Developing animated content ? Here is what to consider

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DgitiaMl atersBolg Digital design branding
resource from London agency Activate
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One of my primary responsibilities as SEO
Consultant at Simply Business, an online business
insurance broker, is to plan and execute
customer-focused content campaigns. Our goal is
to help small businesses and landlords manage
their companies, by providing them with useful
tips and advice on financing, law, human
resources, taxation, marketing and more. My tasks
involve coming up with appropriate ideas,
creating a design brief, managing the
implementation and then, once a content piece is
live, promoting it on suitable websites and
social media. Over the last two years we have
focused on content campaigns for small business
owners. However, our customer base covers another
key group landlords and this year we have
been developing fresh content to cater for both.
At the start of 2013, we decided to come up with
an interactive guide for first time landlords
based in the UK. We are thrilled with the end
result a microsite called Landlord Town. This
animated resource is designed to a high spec and
works well for virtually all our landlord
customers, but designing and developing it took
much more time and effort than we initially
expected. I have shared some of most important
takeaways from the project below. If you are
thinking about creating a piece of animated
content, the lessons we learned will hopefully
help you to avoid many frustrations and save your
time and energy.
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Technology HTML5 or Flash Our developers
presented two alternatives for building the
animated guide either using HTML5 and
JavaScript, or Flash. Since 25 of our customers
visit us via a mobile device, one of the biggest
drawbacks for using Flash to develop Landlord
Town was that it simply does not work on mobiles.
We were also concerned with Flash browser
compatibility, along with lost SEO benefits
(search bots cannot index Flash content). So
after some debate, we decided to develop Landlord
Town using HTML5 and JavaScript. It is
imperative to decide early on which technology
you will use to develop an animated piece of
content. Animations will need to be formatted
accordingly either as a group of image frames or
as a complete Flash file. Putting together all
the files by developers will also require a
different process using each technology. So, it
iandlord enes worth your time to perform a
detailed analysis of the pros and cons of HTML5
and Flash. You can go through flashvhtml.com or
this Wikipedia page to compare the two and
decide which development method is better for
your project.