A couple of the factors in considering when to use flex for a website:
I don't own flash and don't want to spend the money on it (Adobe is proud of it's flagship, Bismarch be praised). I had already played around with Flex and figured I wouldn't have much trouble with it.
I wanted some movement and flashiness. I could think outside of the box - literally - by doing away with the column, row, div paradigm. I also knew I could get my clients to go "wow" when I showed them the site.
I don't have to fight different web browsers. Coming from a programming background - I hate it when I get something to work, then have to get it to work again; in technical terms, bleh. That alone is a major downside of Ajax. Flex let's you get down to the business of productivity.
The company already has decent marketing in place so SEO wouldn't be the essential purpose behind the website. Of course, I need to SEO, but for this project, I can focus on one or two key search terms.
While crunching through the website, these are some of the Flex highlights I found:
1. The actionscript blends superbly well with the markup langauge ( almost no thought required ). You can take the code behind, embedded, or object oriented approach. Figuring out 'when' you can reference something doesn't require you to 'go under the hood' and study the nuances of the flash player, something that seems to be a requirement when dealing with .net. 2. Flex has some built in but very basic animation capabilities. I stuck with those for this last project so as to save some programming time. Flex animation is handled through 'state' changes, which is roughly similar to tweening in flash. Actionscript can be used for more advanced animation features; so, theoretically, you should be able to do just about anything in Flex that you do in Flash. 3. Skinning of buttons is not an easy task. While reading different resources, I've discovered more than one person saying that skinning a Flex app can kill development time, especially when there are mid project changes to the look and feel. The next version is supposed to address this issue better. For now, keep that in mind if you are designing with custom buttons, scroll bars, etc. I decided to go with images and clickable text this time. Also, the default skin was a decent fit for this assignment.
4. SEO, ouch. What can I say but Adobe, along with the peeps that bring you search engines, are working on it. For now, there are a few tricks that can help a little <- saving that for a later date. If you have a client that is trying to drive lots of random web traffic to their site with a few different search terms, think about html pages with embedded Flex or find another tool. How many times have you landed on a fully flash site while searching on Google? This site landed in fifth place under "dfw music studio". Not too bad but I had to sacrifice all other search terms to get it there.
Kind Regards, Randall
