Behind the Scenes: A Multimedia Gallery with Substance and Flash

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August 2009, Issue 66

Lead-Generation Best Practices
Behind the Scenes: A Multimedia Gallery with Substance and Flash
By Brian Maschler, Senior Creative Developer, Bulldog Solutions

We've all heard about the shoemaker's children having no shoes, right? When it came to showcasing our multimedia projects, that was us. Rather than consolidating projects and making them readily available to our prospects and sales team, we'd allowed them to exist as a collection of loose URLs.

So, when a new client asked, "What would that look like?" we'd scramble to find the relevant URL to show the example in action. Not an efficient way to showcase our work.

From that challenge was born Bulldog's new Multimedia Solutions gallery. In the spirit of our Behind the Scenes series, I'd like to share the design and development process here, with a goal of giving marketers and designers ideas for their own Web galleries.

Before we look under the hood, take a look at the final product: http://www.bulldogsolutions.com/solutions/engage-audience/multimedia/mm-solutions

Our Challenge: A Gallery Worthy of Its Content

Multimedia is widely acknowledged to be a powerful marketing tool. And here at Bulldog Solutions, we've developed some incredible implementations of multimedia.

A typical advertising agency would create a "portfolio" of the most attractive examples, regardless of the marketing results of the campaign. For us, the performance of the creative tools matters. A lot. These tools are designed to meet sales and marketing needs such as data capture and lead generation. So we chose to present each asset in a "case study" format, identifying the marketing need and explaining how our solution met it.

A few other must-haves we agreed on at the very start:

Clean, compelling design: The gallery had to have a design at least as compelling as the projects themselves. It had to be engaging without being so eccentric that it would detract from the examples.
User-friendly navigation: The gallery had to be more innovative than a traditional HTML-based image gallery. Yet while the tendency is to focus on how something can be different, we also have to put ourselves in the user's role and ask, "How would I expect this to work?" Users don't have time to figure out overly experimental page navigation.
Sales has to love it: The gallery ultimately had to be a useful tool for our sales team. If it didn't work for them, it didn't work. So we ensured checkpoints with sales constituents throughout the process.

The Solution: Planning for Scalability Without Losing Sight of the User

The final gallery was a fusion of highly dynamic Flash with our Web site's Drupal-based architecture. Below is a behind-the-scenes look at some our challenges building the portfolio and how we overcame them.

First, here's a quick look at a wireframe of the layout:

Wireframe Layout

Issue 1: Scalability. The bulk of the page's content is built in Flash, and it needs to be updated regularly as we add new projects, which leads us to a major developmental challenge: scalability. If you want to make text easy to edit in a Flash-based application, it needs to be dynamic. That means that the text can reside outside the actual Flash files (in an XML or simple TXT file, for example).

The benefit of having lots of dynamic text is that anyone can easily edit the text without editing the Flash production files. This means the entire organization is not reliant on the original designer. However, if all of the text is dynamic, the page has to be designed and built to accommodate varying amounts of text information.

There were two key areas where scalability was a challenge that required a good deal of time to work out: the placement of the "view now" button and the "solution" text. When this challenge was overcome, those items would move up or down to accommodate the text above them (as opposed to sitting static in the same place no matter how long or short the text above them).

Issue 2: User experience. We had to pay a lot of attention to determine the best user experience for viewing each asset. For some examples, the context of the page it resides on is fundamental to understanding its purpose. For other examples, where the application is more self-sufficient, a JavaScript lightbox effect (a temporary overlay of the Web site) seemed like a far more attractive option.

A lightbox allows users to see the example in an isolated environment and precludes the need to open a new browser window (an experience we generally try to avoid). Launching the JavaScript-based lightbox feature from inside a Flash SWF file took more time than expected, as did making the necessary adjustments to the lightbox so that it does not close Flash running on the page.

I don't want to belabor the technical details here other than to illustrate that this solution required some advanced Flash work, and those planning similar projects would be smart to expect unforeseen development issues. For those who are interested, e-mail me and I'd love to talk more about it.

We're proud of the results of this project and will continue to make adjustments to the design and content as we see room for improvements. As I stated earlier, the true test of our Multimedia Solutions page will be the measured benefits for our sales team, traffic on the page, site feedback and overall impact this has for our organization.

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Brian Maschler is senior creative developer at Bulldog Solutions.

Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, a lead optimization and lead management company dedicated to helping our clients generate more, better leads and turn them into revenue. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, Director of Field Marketing.