Macromedia Flash, "Back in the Day"

Back just 4 years ago, Macromedia Flash was receiving all kinds of press about how it would "reinvent the web". Then, Flash was known as mostly an animation tool. Sure you could connect Flash to a database and do some pretty neat stuff with sound but not many people pushed the boundaries.

The result? The sites utilizing strictly Flash got old very quickly. We learned that animated intros to our websites only drove away users and Flash stopped becoming the "hip" design tool. It just wasn't the answer to making the web as interesting and entertaining as we thought it would. The result is that now Flash has for the most part entered the realm of animated banner advertising and trendy designer sites.

This change in attitude toward Flash would seem to be a hindrance in it's growth as an online tool. Instead, it has actually helped Macromedia to zero in on its usefulness. With the growth of broadband connections, the standardization of communication between applications (XML), and the ubiquity of the internet, Flash has been reinvented into a less "Flashy" but more useful tool.

New features in the latest versions of Flash include video, XML connectivity, and a newly reprogrammed component system that streamlines much of the application development process.

Case in Point: The Coaches Locker Customizer

VIA Studio was given the opportunity to help Coaches Locker develop a tool that would make their online shopping experience something unique, fun, and useful. We called it the "Coaches Locker Customizer."

Coaches Locker is a Lexington company that sells sports apparel. Their main operation is selling customized, high-end uniforms and other merchandise to schools and professional teams. The problem with selling these types of items online is that, historically, there was no real way to show what the customer was getting and how it would look before they purchased.

For example: take a basketball jersey. It has up to 16 areas that can be customized when taking into account neck colors, arm trim, body color. Not to mention colors for numbering, lettering, and team logos. With a traditional HTML ordering process, there was no good way for the customer to view an accurate representation of the item they were ordering.

To address this challenge, we developed an application in Flash and tied it into VIA's eCommerce Engine. The Customizer works because it reads in XML all the possible color combinations, fonts, and artwork for a particular jersey so the customer could visually customize their order in real-time plus see exactly how the product will look. After customizing, users can complete the ordering process, save the customization for a future order, or email that customization to an associate for review.

The company that can offer this kind of level of customization online will have a significant advantage over its competitors. Because customers can actually see what they are getting, order cycle times could be reduced, mistakes eliminated, costs lowered.

The backend application makes maintaining product data easy. Coaches Locker staff have no real experience in Flash but still needed to make hundreds of items customizable. Because it wouldn't be cost effective for them to pay us to make each item customizable, we made the engine adaptive enough so that all they needed to do was export the artwork for each item out of Freehand in a swf file. Our Flash application did the rest of the work.

The Coaches Locker Customizer has yet to go live as they are anticipating a complete redesign of their website, but you can see an example of how the Customizer works at http://www.viastudio.com/coacheslocker/.

Coaches Locker and VIA are now in the process of brainstorming Version 2 of the Customizer which will let a customer upload an image file of their team logo, place it on the artwork, and perform other modifications that will make this online tool even more useful and successful.

The Future: No Boundaries! Anything is Possible! Web Designers Conquer the World!

Well, we're not that cocky anymore, unfortunately. We know now Macromedia Flash's real strength lies in the ability to combine multiple types of functionality into a streamlined and well designed interface, allowing companies and agencies to provide innovative ways to solve complicated challenges for themselves and their clients. In the past two years we've been able to guide our clients into solutions that they didn't even know existed, and we've won a few awards along the way. We can do the same for your agency. Just give us a call, I'd be happy to talk about ways to solve problems. That's my job.