Is this possible?

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Soldato
Joined
20 Oct 2002
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London
I've been asked to build a small company's website. They have a design already, and for one section of the website they're interested in having a background like this:

http://www.yooouuutuuube.com/v/?rows=18&cols=18&id=pAwR6w2TgxY&startZoom=1

which changes on different pages. I've done a bit of web design back in the day (bog standard XHTML and CSS) but i'm not really sure if this is possible without making the site un-usable? If it is possible, how on earth would I do it? Flash i presume... :confused:

Also I've never really done any paid work before so am unsure what to charge. I know I should do it by an hourly rate (or at least guess an hourly rate to get some idea), but I can't really figure out how long it's going to take me to create! I'm thinking at least 4-5 full days work, but split between evenings/weekends. The design has been done (there's a PSD at least).. there's about 8 static pages, one with lots of videos, one contact form, one FTP login...

He's a freelance cameraman so he's used to 'real' freelancers rates and I'm hoping hasn't given this to me because he wants it on the cheap! So I'd like to charge somewhere between a 'real' rate, but slightly lower due to my inexperience and probably slightly slow uptake :p

Any pointers? :)
 
I would never consider doing something so horrid but if I were forced at gunpoint or something, I'd drop the flash in and then absolutely position a div overtop to hold the layout.
 
Why would you want content on top of an animated background? You're going to put viewers off straight away..
 
Tripnologist said:
I would never consider doing something so horrid but if I were forced at gunpoint or something, I'd drop the flash in and then absolutely position a div overtop to hold the layout.
Click to expand...

Yep, this. I recently did a site where the client absolutely insisted on some animations despite my best efforts to steer them away from Flash. Had a Flash background then positioned a few divs over the top so that at least search engines picked up relevant content.

As for charging, when I first started out I knew no Flash at all so had to go by guestimates, but because I was learning on the job only charging them for about half that time. Clients don't want to pay you to learn, they want to pay you to do the work asap. So if I thought it would be four days work, I'd charge them for 2-3 days. This meant I could spend 1-2 days learning how to do the task properly without feeling guilty that I was overcharging the client.
 
Argh, animated backgrounds...

You gotta think, where do they want users to look - at the background, or the website's content?!
 
To be fair they are a video production company so with some (subtle?) videos of their work as a background, I think it could work. It could be a bit different.

Then again it could look extremely tacky..
 
Depends entirely how it is done and what the video is of. If it is Alice falling done a rabbit hole then yeah it will be terrible :P If it was a fairly plain video with lots of neutral colours, greys whites etc (and maybe fade it out 20% or so) and the rest of the website was done in a similar style I think it might just work.


As for pay.

When I first started I did something along the lines of:
£20 per hour x 4 Days @ 8 hours a day = £640 (As 1 - 2 days will be learning take say 100 off, so i'd probably call it £550 as an estimate)
 
I'm almost at the stage of attempting to implement this animated background. I was reading about putting the SWF in a DIV and then using z-index to position it behind everything else (i.e. as a background). Does anyone know if this would work? Does z-index work for all browsers etc?

Thanks for any pointers :)
 
What could be really stylish is if you absolutely position some video in the bottom right and gradient to opaque black or white over it and put your content up there. That could work nicely as a demo of what they do and people could still read the content without having a full seizure.
 
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