Flash can be effectively used in business websites if it can be applied to the right content and in the right way. So whats the best thing Flash can add to a business site? Flash can deliver amazing results when its used to drive home a message, something no other form of internet media delivery mechanism can match it in terms of versatility, features and power. Business managers have realised this and are increasingly finding creative applications of Flash not only to add glamor to their site, but most importantly, deliver that most important marketing message in a compelling way that users will never cease to forget.

A few years back, however, Flash movies were kept to the bare minimum in most business sites. Only after the number of Internet users grew exponentially over the last few years did business took notice of this wonderful technology. This, coupled with the ever-increasing average internet bandwidth saw businesses realign their internet strategy to account for more flash content in their sites. Key products had flash presentations that interactively put across the product features. Product advertisements became dynamic - ads were completely made as flash movies that allowed for lots of interaction. Businesses started to realize that Flash-based movies or videos reached target audiences quickly and cost-effectively than traditional media advertisements. The ROI was so impressive that many businesses started lowering their marketing budgetary exposure to traditional media and instead focused more on flash animations and flash movies as an advertisement tool on the Internet.

Effective use of Flash movies in business websites can pay rich dividend if applied properly. Flash videos can add versatility to a site, its simply that extra bit of Flash content on your business website that can make a world of difference if dealt with appropriately.

Flash is so powerful that people sometimes go overboard - an overdose of Flash can do more harm than good. Yet, some get bit by the Flash bug and couldn’t resist to build their site entirely in Flash, forgetting the golden rule - “Never break the browser’s back button!”

All internet browsers have a Back button, a basic navigation control that lets you navigate to the previous page. It might sound simple but at times can turn extremely handy. Assume that you’re filling a lengthly form only to find that you get a “Page cannot be displayed” message on clicking the Submit button. What do you do? Refill in the entire form? Nope, there’s your BACK button - click on it and the entire data that you filled in the form reloads from the browser’s cache. The Back button can be often overlooked for its limited use but at times might turn out to be your biggest savior. However, since the advent of Flash and the increasing number of Flash-based sites, website owners are tempted to redo their entire site in Flash robbing users of their site the freedom to use the Back button. It’s fine to have sites based on Flash if the purpose is simply to present information but if there are forms on the site and if it accepts loads of data then its time to have a rethink.

You might wonder why we have taken this article at Toufee? Well, its always a good thing to know what extremes can mean - overdoing anything pays off negatively. Create flash movies with care and try not to overdo. Thats why we developed Toufee, its gives you the power to create stunning flash presentations but still makes sure your flash videos does what it was meant for!

1. Work while you’re on the move An online free flash movie maker like Toufee helps you go places without worrying about your presentation for the upcoming meeting - you can do it while you’re on the move - in your car or in the Tube, in your living room, during your coffee…no matter where you are, Toufee helps you work effortlessly on your flash presentations
2. Single File, Single Version Imagine you create your flash movie in your home PC, you’re half-done, you copy it in your laptop, contine working on it, you’re still not finished and so you upload to a FTP site so that you can download it later and work in your office desktop. By the time you complete your presentation you have a dozen files and you’re left wondering which version is the latest. Imagine copying the wrong version only to find its half-done in the middle of a review meeting!!! With Toufee, you maintain a single flash movie presentation regardless of where and how you work on it.
3. Get, Set, Go An online flash editor like Toufee allows you get started on your presentations right away. Toufee’s clean and user-friendly interface ensures that there is minimum learning curve which means you can jump-start in creating your movies or presentations in a flash!
4. No software/hardware hassles Online movie makers like Toufee dont require you to install big software, have MBs or GBs of RAM and can significantly cut down on your software and hardware costs
5. Its Free! Good things sometimes do come free. Imagine spending hundreds of dollars on Flash softwares if all you want to do is create a simple flash movie - thats where Toufee scores - its free, and you still get quality outputs that you can get using similar paid softwares

If you are a MySpace user, you can do wonders to your profile with the help of Toufee! Very quickly, MySpace is the most popular social networking site on the internet. Users users can put their profile, share their interests, find friends and do lot more stuff! MySpace is all about collaboration and lots of fun.

First things first…you need to create a Flash movie in Toufee before you can post it to MySpace. The movie can be a cool presentation about your profile, any product promotion (many MySpace users, who run home businesses use Toufee to design Flash animations about their service or product) or simply anything that you wish to express in a catchy way…Adding flash movies to your MySpace profile quickly catches the attention of other users who visit your profile. Ok, once you’ve got your movie done in Toufee, posting to MySpace is a breeze. Within the movie in Toufee, On the top right corner of the interface, you’ll find a option called “Publish”. Clicking on it will open a window. Here you will find option to paste your movie to your personal webpage, or to sites like MySpace, Hi5, Blogger etc…Click on the MySpace icon and Toufee will instantly open another window asking for your MySpace username and password. Enter the details and you’re finished - Toufee is that simple!!!. Login to your MySpace account to find the Toufee movie on your profile page - doesn’t it look cool? Your MySpace profile now gets instant recognition thanks to your eye-candy movie done with Tofuee. Toufee flash movies can turn your MySpace profiles into instant fame - you get noticed now than ever before!

I had the chance to have a look at this movie created by Caprice Hokstad, an ardent Toufee user. Caprice is a fantasy novelist and has only recently started using Toufee to create this professional presentation for her upcoming book. Caprice, like many thousands of other Toufee users, had found it pretty easy to create professional-looking Flash presentations for their business and professional needs. Toufee is simple and fun to use, however, you can still achieve excellent results if you can give a thought and a little planning to your presentation - as Caprice had managed to do!

Before you start using Toufee, please spend some time at the Interactive Tutorials and the Video Tutorials at the Welcome Page - this is the first screen that you will find once you login to Toufee. These tutorials help you get a feel of Toufee and its features. Being highly interactive, the tutorials can get you started in creating Flash movies in no time! You can also have a look at Toufee Gallery, where you’ll find scores of great looking movies done by Toufee users. Looking at the Gallery helps you get a feel of what you can do with Toufee, as well as giving you an idea of various ways in which you can use an effect. Toufee interface is clean and highly user-friendly with easy drag-and-drop facilities and clickable options, which makes you feel at home when creating your presentations. And thats not all; you have a dedicated support team to help with your queries should you ever face any issue working with Toufee.

Creating Flash movies is now made easy - login to Toufee, and you’ll know for sure!

Cheers
Ganesh
Toufee Support

Yesterday, I was browsing through Toufee’s Movie Gallery and was amazed at the quality of the movies that Toufee users created. Its a pleasant surprise really, when you look at what people can do using a tool like Toufee or any tool for that matter. Looking at all those movies, we become more passionate to improve Toufee, provide more features and make it more powerful.

Right from the start, we enjoyed building Toufee. We were passionate about what we did and it clearly shows when one looks at the movies done by Toufee members. At this point, I would like to clarify that I am not exaggerating things coz I am from the Toufee team…really not! I always believe that when you enjoy doing something, you end up with something special - its like an artist admiring his painting for hours, like a designer who’s spellbound looking his designs ramp-walked by models, like a composer who just produced the best music of his life…you can go on but the feeling is the same, its the act of enjoying what you do. Toufee is something close to our heart and that we enjoying building to make it better everyday.

Last but not the least, Toufee is nothing without YOU. Its because of your creative content that makes Toufee a success. Its your creative passion that keeps us going, its your creativity that translates into us making Toufee and its the power of YOU that drives us in building Toufee.

Please leave your suggestions on what you think about Toufee, any features that you require, any comments that you may have or just anything about Toufee. YOU are the power behind Toufee.

Cheers
Ganesh
Toufee Support

Hey there, hope you are doing well!

Now for those of you who have used YouTube and spent hours watching your favorite videos, then Toufee does give you more reasons to be happy. Did you know you can import your favorite YouTube videos into your Toufee Flash movies? And doesn’t it make for a killer flash presentation to have a video complement your Flash design?

Its pretty straight-forward to add YouTube videos to your Toufee project. In your Toufee “Work Area” you will find a button called “Add Video”. Click it and you’ll be taken to “My Videos” section where you can manage your videos. Here you will find the option “YouTube Vids” where you can search for your favorite YouTube videos from within Toufee! and add these YouTube videos to your project at the click of a button - Toufee is that simple!. Alternatively if you know the exact link of the YouTube video you can directly paste the link and Toufee will get it for you. Further more, Toufee allows you to search videos from a specific YouTube user.

If you are that kind that digs deep for videos and still can’t find that in YouTube, then probably you might try Google Videos and if you’re lucky and end up finding your video - well Toufee allows you to add that into your project as easily as sipping a glass of beer. So start exploring and see for yourself some cool things that you can do with Toufee!

Till my next post -

Cheers
Ganesh
Toufee Support

Last weekend, I met this friend of mine named Clifton (aka “Cliffy”), who works for a popular web design and consultancy firm - so popular that his company designs sites for top brands and celebrities. It was our usual coffee shop, and we were glad to find a table given its a Saturday eve. He was going through the details of a soon-to-be-launched internet marketing campaign for one of their clients. He showed me some storyboards of the project and some initial designs made using Flash . “Impressive!”, said I. “Sure it should be”, he paused “We’ve been brainstroming last week before arriving at this one”. I wondered how procedured and structured web design has become - and most importantly, the priority given to Flash-enabled sites when you think that the very same tool was considered as “to be avoided” so many years back when we started designing for the Internet.

Cliffy and I were passionate at computers right from our school days. We designed our school site - that was way back in 1999 when Macromedia Dreamweaver was the obvious choice for building websites; while we did our graphics in PaintShopPro - another tool long forgotten now, we never darred to think of a single Flash movie in our site coz if you did you could bet for sure that people would give you the wildest look. Back then, web design was thought to be simple and we were always taught to avoid needless images and animations. We saw the term Flash predominantly in the “DONT’S”, atleast in our courseware! Only a handful of sites back then had used Flash and books on web design go on complaining how bad a designer you can turn into if you started putting Flash movies on your site. Flash is bad, it takes a hell lot of time to load (bandwith back then was scarce, the avg speeds were 40kbps. Even a page with a few images would take a while to load), you’ve gone nuts if you use Flash - these were the stuff that I get to hear back then constantly!

Its been over 7 years now and the Internet has changed in a big way. Flash has become the defacto standard for creating interactive websites. Cliffy tells that even clients who just need static websites want their design based in some form of catchy Flash design. Cliffy was also briefing me some of his earlier projects that extensively used Flash - an online couresware solution for a leading corporate, a promotion campaign for a large multinational brand - the list ever-expanding and as interesting as their details. In all these projects I was amazed at how Flash has become an important strategy in the e-commerce initiatives of businesses - Flash are no more mere eye-candy graphics or welcome screens, they are now tightly integrated into the e-business plan. So we spoke and we were momentarily interrupted by a cup of cold coffee and I thought it was a nice way to cool off a too techy talk. The next half-hour we chatted over some wild topics, politics (as usual), the scorching summer, the last performance of “Broken Wood” (one of my friends is a bassist in the band and they did a pretty good show a couple of weeks at one of the parties of a famous IT company - I grabbed an invite through my friend!).

As I wished Cliffy goodbye I was still left thinking how Flash has changed the dynamics of web and its ability to steer a creative revolution that could find business applications economically and within many manager’s marketing budgets.

Meet you all in my next post!
Ganesh
Toufee.com

Hi,
Probably the deadline to launch toufee 2.0 passing us by… :-/

I’m sorry to tell you that we’re running a bit late for the launch of our second version and it may be just a few more days before you can finally get your hands on the new supercharged version of toufee.

But I promise you this is worth the wait

Thanks for your patience.

Best Regards,
San,
Co-Founder,
Toufee.com.

~Tou-ch & Fee-l the
Internet with Toufee~