>video myself but as this client has a past career in video work >there was no telling her to leave the video out...trust me, >here is, indeed, a skip button which takes the visitor straight into the site. Lea There's a place for flash animations and video for sure ... but in two places they don't work for me 1) At home on dial up: 2) Corporate environment where, for instance, our firewall blocks even WAV files let alone MPEGS (and certainly will not allow ANY plugins to download just to view some kewl animations) Personally I find "opt-in" rather than "opt-out" a more user friendly default for eye-candy frills :o) The issue is not persuading you client not to use animations but, if it matters to them, in keeping the site friendly to those who can't / don't want to see them [unless of course video is the *whole* point of the site]. When you said "10 sec to load" ... was that on broadband? As a photographer can't you encourage the client to have some fast loading stills as an opening - maybe to at least give the customer/visitor something to look at while the animation was loading. Another thought: Never seen it done but how about having short animated gifs (covering the first few frames of the video) as thumbnails to animated content? Pretty much all of us can see them. A final thought: if it's a corporate site how do they intend to deal with accessibility? Certainly in the EU you are obliged to consider those things. For plain images it's easy ... you just populate the alt tags ... Bob PS ... can you pass us the link when you have sorted it?
