I have lost the battle in persuading against this so...

I have a 3 second animation that needs to play on a black screen before then automatically loading the website. Since it has to be there, I want to make it as user friendly as it possibly can be.

My thoughts are:

- Make it short (3 seconds)

- Make it go directly to the site (without an ENTER HERE)

- Make it only ever play once on a PC (using a cookie i guess)

- Somehow make the actual web page load during this 3 seconds so it is ready and waiting behind the animation. The animation could then fade away?

 

I have written the the website from scratch using fully validated XHTML. I have also made the animation. The problem is that i never done anything like this before and do not know how to do any of the other parts. I have had a good look around for tutorials etc but cant seem to find anything.....i guess because no-one does this on websites any more!!

 

Does anyone have any suggestions for any of this? Or tutorials? I literally just have a site and an animation and the only other progress i have made towards this is:

Ive generated a div placed at the top of my html that is black and covers the whole screen, then raised to the top with z-index. I thought I would then add the flash to the middle of this. This should load first because it is at the top and the rest of the page will load behind it. I now need this whole thing to disappear once the video has finished...and it would be nice if it fades!! Im guessing using java? I could ignore the cookie part for now if that helps.

 

I really wish I could avoid all this as i don't really like them and I also have no idea how to do it. I guess I'll take it as a learning opportunity.

Thanks

Alway always always put a highly visible text link so the visitor can bypass the flash movie. On occasions when the visitors hasn't got flash player installed, or they're blocking flash (ie with Flashblock), they won't see the movie and have no way into the site.

 

But the number one reason to have a plain text link is to allow search engines into the site so they can spider the content.

I must just re-empathise that I dont actually want to add this flash page to the site for those reasons amongst others! However, I lost the battle with that one so...

...my logic for adding the flash vid to a div that will overlay the rest of the site was so that the rest of the page will still be there underneath and so will be trawlable. Is this sensible?

Also, I was thinking it might be a good idea to actually have the div generated by java itself and therefore if someone does not have it available it will not load. As for not having flash, is there some way of making the java not load unless flash is enabled?

 

I have thought of some ways of making this as thing as tidy as it possibly can be but just don't have the knowledge to generate the code!