P5 Factors for consideration

P5

When creating animations for web the biggest factors are file size, file compatibility with various browsers and ease of loading. Ease of loading is an important one to consider as if the entire web page is slowed simply because of a cumbersome animation; users will soon lose interest and look elsewhere and as many users will have varying connection speeds their loading times may already be about as long as they are willing to wait to view an animation. After that you would consider user interaction and how to keep these animations or functions interesting as well as positioning and dimensions because a poorly laid out site can detract from any images or animations on the site that would otherwise be quite impressive or entertaining.

One way of both keeping things interesting and helping to reduce loading time is rollover animations, rather than having something constantly playing that will slow loading times, the animation only becomes active once the user interacts with that particular image or button. Examples would be interactive menus, small embedded games, animated site logos and web banners that react to the users’ cursor.

Another factor is taking into account that not all people will be viewing your web page on a computer, so compatibility with multiple hardware formats should be included; such as PDA/smart phones and tablets/ipads.

When it comes to cross hardware compatibility, considering apple products, specifically the ipad and iphone, should be a given as they do not use a lot of the same software as windows and android devices. For example the ipad, iphone and mac do not use Adobe flash and therefore animations that are created in flash will/may not work on these devices.