I was checking out the ads for Flash template sites on my site tonight and it reminded me of something that I meant to blog about long ago. Early this past Spring I got a call from an old friend of mine who wanted a photography site (a flashy one..) set up. I was super busy, but I wanted to help him out so I agreed to set him up with a site. He takes some amazing outdoor shots, and has been to some nice spots. Check out his site..
Anyway, back to the Flash template thing. So remember this was when I was really busy and all, so I told him just to pick out a template from one of the sites and I’d drop his photos in and all would be good. I figured It’d take a couple of hours tops. And so he went and picked out a template, bought it, downloaded it, and e-mailed it to me. I opened it the evening before we were going to get together and work on it and immediately knew I was in for more than a couple of hours. What I found was code from the Flash 5 (maybe even 4) days, the library and layers were all one flat structure without folders, symbols in the library weren’t named in any logical way, it was built to ONLY have the exact number of photos and categories that were already in it, the original SWF was around 5Mb, and on and on.. It was a freaking mess.... but it worked. And that’s the important thing.
My buddy was able to look at the original SWF, tell me what he wanted changed, and after an evening and a couple of hours in the morning it was all working and he was happy. There are a ton of things on the site that could be improved, but that can happen later. The Flash template was a starting point, and that’s all it was supposed to do. Even though I had to spend some time fixing the template (somewhat) to my standards I still saved a ton of time by using it.
