Website done entirely in InDesign!

[LERsince1991]

Hi,

I've never done web design before, always print because I didn't know or enjoy coding. But I needed a new website so I put together the draft design in InDesign, then tweaked it till I was happy and got quotes from friends and professionals to make it into a working website.

I bought a domain and as a temporary solution uploaded the pdf from ID. This was then replaced with a .swf flash file for many reasons. I then saw that when exporting there were options to export interactive objects so I looked into it and messed around, then worked it all out.

From this morning to now, so in 1 day I have made my website and it is pretty much fully working, with page transitions and even video content built in!

Only 2 downsides are that it take about 60 seconds to load and also the text isnt selectable (for copy & Paste).

I thought I would show people how easy it is because I've just learnt it!
What do you think?
Luke.

LINK: www.lrdesignltd.co.uk

 

[citizenzen]

Well, it is interesting to see what Indesign is capable of.

And it does look nice.

I also hear you can layout entire magazines using Photoshop.

 

[dmmcintyre3]

A few things to point out about it being 100% flash. First, you are blocking out the entire iPod/iPhone/iPad community. Second most search engines don't read flash content.

 

[ChicoWeb]

Didn't load for me.

 

[LERsince1991]

Didn't load for me.

Could you try it again now maybe?
The site should be smoother and a lot quicker now, 360 view video for novanta now working too

 

[Sdashiki]

Creative Suite 5 FTW...or is it FTL?

Im still up in the air with the interactive features of CS5...and this one being flash and not HTML5 doesnt jive with me.

In any case, its a nicely laid out "site".

 

[ChicoWeb]

Oh Okay, it loaded after about 25 seconds. How big are those files?

 

[LERsince1991]

Creative Suite 5 FTW...or is it FTL?

Im still up in the air with the interactive features of CS5...and this one being flash and not HTML5 doesnt jive with me.

In any case, its a nicely laid out "site".

Yeh would be awesome to have it export HTML5 directly
Cheers!

Oh Okay, it loaded after about 25 seconds. How big are those files?

Ah cool, 1.7mb
Tried to get it smaller but thats as good as I can get atm

 

[snickelfritz]

Nice site, but ideally, all-Flash sites should load the data from an external xml file, with each section of the site dynamically loaded as external SWF files.
You can then use PHP to map the xml data to the Flash content div in the index file.
This dramatically reduces the filesize of the SWF; an initial download filesize of <30k is possible with a site like the one you posted.

This would allow you to construct an HTML/CSS/JS representation of the data for non-flash devices and search engines.
Dreamweaver CS5 has very useful HTML5 extension that simplifies formatting the content for devices of various sizes.

The InDesign SWF export does a very nice job of prototyping a website, but I doubt it's actually intended to produce content for deployment.
For example, a designer can create an interactive design to show to a client using this method, then hand it off to a "real" Flash developer as a reference.