Give Your Site a Backbone with Gaia

Sales people like to say someone gets closed every call, either you close the client on your idea or they close you on theirs. I’ve heard every excuse from internet marketers to high-level CEO’s why they don’t want to use Flash as their platform and up until recently I let myself believe they had a legitimate reason to hack together a site with CSS rather than Flash it out. There were always two specific objections I couldn’t overcome: SEO and deep-linking.

Today I broke open Gaia for the first time and it’s literally changed my world and the world of every client who from this day will have to deal with my maniacal zealotry. Gaia should put a stop to all the whining and complaining done by those who would choose another platform for “SEO compatibality”. But don’t expect by just using the framework the game is over, you’ve got to explain you’re reasons and if I’m going to roll I want to be armed to the teeth with loads of quality information.

Under the hood Gaia gives you is a simple system for Deep-Linking and SEO via “tight integration” with SWF Address. Two things I routinely pass over because of the time they take to implement properly. With Gaia I was able to build out a complete site framework in about 6 hours with an animated nav that supports deep-linking. It’s just sweet!

The first time you break into Gaia there’s an opportunity to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of files it creates for you. Once you understand the framework I can’t even begin to explain how easy it was to setup and start developing. With the Gaia framework you get an FLA and AS file for each page node that you define in a site.xml. Each page inherits an IN & OUT transition and you can use the timeline or Actionscript for your transitions. Gaia goes on to include depth management, event hijacking, and custom preloaders and it’s well worth the time to learn if you do more than 2 or 3 sites a year. I can’t see any other drawbacks except for the learning curve to understand what you’re getting with the framework that’s distributed freely under an MIT license.

Don’t let anyone sell you on why they should use Silverlight, or .Net or anything other than Flash when you know Flash is right for the job. You might hear from clients that you can’t use a certain version of Flash because the adoption isn’t high enough. I heard from a client recently that they didn’t want to publish to Flash 9 because it had “only” penetrated 95% of browsers. I reject this whole-heartedly and my favorite come back is to ask them a rhetorical question “how many languages do they support”? Chances are it’s only English and seeing as only 75% of the US population speaks English I kindly point out they have no problem with 25% of the population not being able to use their site.

Grow a backbone if you need one and never give up the good fight!

Update: Good point Ali. Here’s Gaia