Pages no longer need to refresh in their entirety to reflect user ineractions.  Ajax – asynchronous javascript -  can make this happen quickly and in front of your eyes.

Study the jQuery web site – this is an library of javascript routines that make javascript coding that little bit easier to learn.

jQuery supplies a series of easy to use APIs – one weekend of study should see you on your way to enlivening your site.

If I really needed a long and drawn out flash presentation I would have to outsource it to someone with the right skills. And I can only imagine that would be if I wanted to build a full flash web site.

Mostly what I need, like many other people, are tiny flash movies that I place within an ordinary XHTML site. That way you get the benefits of free search engine traffic (because XHTML websites offer far more opportunities for search engine love than do, pure flash sites).

The product I love to use is called 3DFA. It is relatively cheap, and the interface has been improving over the years. It doesn’t take long to make a flash movie using the tools provided in 3DFA. The only disappointment is that the help is relatively terse.

That said, my advice is to spend an hour just trying to use the product.

Here is a page from a site I did for a client. The animation at the top is a flash animation made using 3DFA. The image slideshow in the bottom right, in case you want to know was achieved using this product.

Note that the curved edge to the slideshow animation was achieved by using 3DFA to create a flash mask for the slideshow.

See The Characters in Action on Live Sites

• Property How To – Parmdeep appears on the home page and we have used his own voice
• The Chain Gang – click on a FAQ question and Bernard will speak the answer to you! In this case, the audio is all Text to Speech technology.

In both cases, I set up animated characters to actually look like the site owners just by using tools supplied with Sitepal to change hair, skin and eye-colour, hair style, beards and clothing.

It’s amazing how close to the real person you can get just by using these easy tools.

Roll Your Cursor Over the Image to Hear the Character Speak

The demo on this page uses a technology called “text to speech”. That means it is very simple to have talking animated character speak the text that you type. This can engage your visitors and give them a flavour of who you are.

You can also record your own voice and have the character lip-synch your words.

This is especially effective as it avoids some of the slight awkwardness that occurs when using text to speech as no doubt you have noticed in this demo. This is an amazing technology available to you from Sitepal for a very small subscription. They really have gone out of their way to make this product affordable.

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification