When considering Web strategies for your company, 3-D graphics and animation may not come to mind quickly. If you think about 3-D content, you tend to think first of client-based games, Web-based real-time gaming, or video production.
Perhaps you are seeking ways to increase Web site traffic, up the amount of time visitors spend at your site, or just reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts in your e-commerce applications. Interactive rich media (various types of multimedia) elements can keep visitors coming to your site and increase the number of completed transactions with ease.
Many e-commerce companies are jockeying for customers by creating increasingly sophisticated Web sites. If you're looking for a way to make your site more consumer-friendly, consider purchasing Adobe Systems Inc.'s LiveMotion 1.0 for your Web designers. This comprehensive Web graphics and animation tool, currently available as a beta download, lets your staff add JavaScript rollovers and animation to your e-commerce site without having to rely on a collection of disparate products or a large staff of designers.
Making your e-business stand out from the crowd requires sophisticated graphics design, and that requires sophisticated graphics design tools. Vector-based drawing products were originally created for designers to develop resolution-independent artwork for print design. Currently, these same products are proving very useful for Web design as well as for print. One product that is particularly adept at both is Macromedia Inc.'s FreeHand.
It's no secret that people search for information differently from the way they used to. Instead of flipping on the television or opening up the newspaper, many of us are going online for our daily dose. Forward-thinking organizations such as CNN and MTV are using the latest technologies to push the boundaries of what we expect from a Web site.
KEEPING SITES UPDATED with new content is a full-time job if you're stuck doing it by hand. Although many tools for creating dynamic Web pages exist, no solution we've seen this year can match the power offered by Macromedia Generator 2, so selecting it as the Web-Site Solutions Product of the Year was easy.
Macromedia's Flash authoring tool helps designers of commercial Web sites attract visitors by incorporating compelling, interactive graphics and animation into their Web pages. However, even graphically rich Web sites can grow stale if users see the same thing each time they visit. For companies with revenue-generating Web sites, what's needed are tools that allow designers to deliver the dynamic, targeted graphics that draw visitors but avoid the development time and costs that go into constant updating and republishing. Macromedia introduced such a solution last year with Generator. Now, with Version 2, Macromedia has greatly enhanced Generator's capability of delivering dynamic Flash media, while keeping the design work to a minimum.
In an increasingly dispersed corporate environment, it's becoming more common to collaborate with co-workers who live in a completely different time zone, making it difficult to meet face-to-face.
Since it first hit the market in 1996, Macromedia Flash has fast become the de facto standard for adding dazzling effects to Web sites. With the release of Flash 4, Macromedia has made a fantastic product even better.
If you need to provide your branch offices with fast Internet access, you should definitely consider a WebRamp 410i.
Macromedia's Fireworks 2, a sophisticated software package that enables Web developers to create and optimise graphics for corporate Web sites, is a notable improvement over the previous release. Compared to Adobe ImageReady, Fireworks is easier to use, and its expanded feature set lets users perform all of the tasks associated with creating, editing, and optimising Web graphics, without having to use another application.
While most new applications become "fatter" and demand more resources, Microsoft's latest release of Internet Explorer for the Macintosh does just the opposite. Version 4.5 includes a bevy of enhancements, is easier to use and install, and improves performance substantially over earlier versions and Netscape Communicator 4.5 -- thanks to a smaller memory footprint.
Generally, Web-to-host products function in a similar manner -- clients visit a Web site to which they can establish a host session by way of a Java-based applet.