George Patterson Y&R contracted Code and Visual to complete and clean up the development of the Mighty Artline site on a very tight deadline. This involved re-implementing swfAddress and succesfully rebuilding the drawing function which is central to the site concept.
The site also implements Code and Visual’s cutsom form kit which streamlines the production of forms within Flash which I’m intending to release as an open source tool kit very soon.
View the site here: The Mighty Artline
You can now pick up a licence for Rainbow Live at the amazing price of $49 for the next month. If you’ve built a Flash website that uses external XML data, then you can use Rainbow Live to instantly add CMS functionality, which will allow your client to edit the data without having to sift through a complex XML file.
From a value adding point of view it makes sense to be able to offer your client not only a website, but also a CMS for that website at very minimal cost to you. Obviously this is something you can add to your quote and probably charge quite a lot more for.
As you can see Rainbow is great for Flash Photography Websites, Portfolio websites and any other sort of site that can make use of the combination of slick Flash presentation and external XML data.
Learn more about Rainbow Live Flash CMS
View a quick view about Rainbow Live Flash CMS
You can always Code and Visual if you’re looking for a Flash Developer
For those of you that are unaware, Code and Visual develop and maintain a Flash CMS called Rainbow Live which is used to power Flash websites based on XML. The purpose of Rainbow Live was to create an easy and flexible solution for using Flash XML to power small to medium sized Flash websites. XML is by far the most popular data format for dynamic Flash websites. The biggest downside to using XML in a CMS sense is that it can be a daunting proposition for a non technically minded person (such as your client) to make changes with. Enter Rainbow Live.
Rainbow live can import your existing XML file and immediately give it a visual, node based editing environment. Not only that but you can use it to upload images and other content, automatically create thumbnails, and even automatically generate a search engine friendly HTML backup version of your content. With the power of Rainbow the actual content of your site can be viewed on devices that do not have Flash installed – such as the iPhone and the iPad.
Visit the Rainbow site today.
Watch a short video about how you can use Rainbow Live to create a CMS for your Flash Website.
If you want to try it out, you can install a fuly functional free 30 day trial of Rainbow live Flash CMS.
Finally, here a are a few links explaining how Rainbow Live can add SEO functionaity to your Flash Website
Thanks to all the fantastic feedback about the new SEO features in Rainbow 1.5.1. A few very good suggestions were made and we’ve incorporated some of them in to the latest update.
It’s now even simpler to add text,image and video items to the SEO lists which can now be done through one single property per media type. You’re also able to directly target properties of your page nodes and use either attribute values or node text values.
View the new updated tutorials here:
Generate HTML Backup of your Flash sites for Better SEO
Generate Google Sitmaps of your Flash sites for Better SEO
With the release of Rainbow Live 1.5.1 it’s surprisingly easy to generate an HTML alternative version of your Flash site. This will allow search engines and users without the Flash Player installed to search and navigate through the content, images and links on your site. In the first post we talked about Rainbow’s new Automated Sitemap Generator and now it’s time to introduce the Automated Dataource Generator.
This shows a typical Flash site that can be powered by Rainbow Live
This shows the HTML backup version of your Flash site generated by Rainbow Live
This shows the HTML Backup page without CSS
Being that Flash is a compiled file format it’s not easy for search engines to actually understand the internal structure of your Flash websites. There are tools which allow some internal inspection of .swf files, but they don’t tend to understand anything about the site’s information architecture. Add to this the fact that most Flash sites these days will be using external resources such as data specified in an XML file, the usefulness of accessible content within a .swf file is actually quite minimal.
Furthermore, with the popular new range of internet surfing devices by a certain fruity company that won’t allow Flash content to play in their web browser, the incentive for creating a simple HTML version as a backup alternative to your site becomes even more compelling.
By combining with SWFAddress and SWFObject, Rainbow Live 1.5.1 makes it easy to create an HTML alternative that will automatically transition users from the full Flash version of your site, should they not be able to view it, to something that will alow them to view and navigate through the content on your site.
What also makes this so fantastic is that google and other search egines are now able to index and search through the actual content of your site without having to rely on an expertly chosen domain name or some strategic meta data additions to your HTML page. Now instead of only linking to page titles provided by deep linking, the actual content can be crawled through and will be available to the search engines to match in their search results. At the end of the day this means your site will appear more times and be more relevant to what users are looking for on google and other search engines.
See the tutorial on the Datasource Generator in Rainbow Live 1.5.1 to learn how you can easily make your Flash sites search engine friendly. Learn more about how easy it is to add Rainbow as a CMS to your Flash site, or about all the other benefits of Ranbow Live.
With the release of Rainbow Live 1.5.1 it’s surprisingly easy to build a Flash site that can be indexed by search engines such as Google.
The first new tool that Rainbow provides is an automated sitemap generator. By indicating which of your XML node types are to be considered destination URLs, Rainbow will automatically output a Google formatted XML file called sitemap.xml in to your domain root. Once you submit this to google it will be aware of what URLs you wish to be indexed for your site (of course you ultimately have no control over what Google actually does decide to index).
That’s only half of the story however as the sitemap can’t do it’s job if there are no specific URLs to load – this is where deep linking with SWFAddress comes in. SWFAddress is an Actionscript and Javascript package that allows sections within your Flash site to be accessed directly via a URL. Previously if someone wanted to send a link to a certain page in a Flash website, they would have to send a link to the .swf file. This would load like normal and then the visitor would have to manually naviagate to find the relevant content. In this context, he benefits of using a deep linking system become clearly obvious. By combining deep linking with Rainbow 1.5.1′s new automated sitemap generation, you can supply Google with URLs to specific sections within your Flash site that users and serach engine’s alike can load directly.
Having set up your Flash file to use SWFAddress, Rainbow makes generating a sitemap a breeze. See the following tutorial for a simple step by step guide on how to set up Rainbow to generate an automated sitemap.
The next post will deal with Rainbow 1.5.1′s other new tool, simplified datasource export – this will allow you to automatically generate a backup HTML version of your Flash site so that it can be read by search engines and user’s that do not have the Flash Player installed.
The soon to be newly released upgrade for Rainbow Live will bring automatic search engine optimisation to your Flash projects. As we all know, Flash is a great technology but unfortunately as far as search engines are concerned, uncompiled markup is still the only truly effective way of getting your site content indexed. Sitemaps are another way to increase search engine awareness of your site, but manually creating and updating these can be a sizeable chore. Enter Rainbow Live 1.5.1!
With Rainbow Live 1.5.1 you will be able to:
For more information, check out these links:
