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animation

Although I'll do all I can to discourage you from having animation on your sites, I know it can be fun to do so I'll cover it. Please put any animations on a separate "fun" page though, not your main homepage - or really you'll annoy any serious surfers. It's VERY distracting from the content of the page, after all (which is why advertisers use it so much).

There are all sorts of types of animation, but the only type that will work from pretty much everyone, regardless of browser, is the animated gif. You can make your own very easily, or there are many copyright-free ones available on the web, such as:

http://www.webutilities.com/community/gifzone/libraries/default.asp

Or you can be creative and make your own. Freeware and Shareware for Gif Animation is available at:

http://tucows.com

The examples I've made on the right only have about three or four frames each, so they're not huge files. The first one of the spinning girl was made from rotating the image about 90 degrees in each direction, then putting the three images into sequence.

The second one was made using PSP's Edit/Deformations/Pinch and /Punch functions, then alternating the deformed image with the original.

Macromedia's Flash is a good format for large, showy animations, such as advertising intros - the filesizes are relatively small, especially if your graphics are vector-based. The last figures I heard suggested that about 75% of surfers have Flash installed - although that's not necessarily the latest version, so try to make Flash animations compatible with earlier versions if you want to use it. There are some great Flash resources linked from my introduction.

I would ask you though to consider - is an animation REALLY necessary? I see web animation as a bit like pop-up books - perfect to get the attention of a four-year-old, but with limited purpose once the kid can read.

As for big flashy site-intros - they may be wow-worthy once, but who wants a site that people only visit once? Unless there's content, I won't be a returning visitor nomatter how amazing a site looks - and even with a "skip intro" option, the delay of a Flash-based site is often enough to discourage a hardened surfer like myself.