Creating a website Flash demo: what should the technical requirements be?

My boss has asked me to create the technical requirements for a design consultancy who are going to be tasked with creating a demo of our website.

To be honest I don't any more about Flash than your typical Youtube user, so I'm floundering a bit!

The website to be demo'd is is designed to run at a minimum res of 1024x768. We'd like to be able to show it on any device, but I suspect text would be unreadable on any mobile devices, so they're probably out of the equation...(?)

So far, I've got these requirements, but I suspect some of them are redundant, or too open to make any odds... do you have any suggestions?

FLV file

Player version: Adobe Flash Player v6+ Adobe Flash Lite v3+

Browser compliance: IE6,7,8 Firefox 3,4 Chrome, Safari, Opera latest versions

OS compliance: Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Win7 开发者_运维问答Mac OS X Linux (?)

Mobile: ?

Web compliance:

(our wesbite is !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd")

Security Flash cookies: no

Any help would be much appreciated!

Flash V6 is really a tough requirement. It's 8 years old! IE6 is also quite hard to meet without (useless) additional development costs. If you want to exclude mobile devices, you should also exclude FlashLite and ask for a more recent version of Flash.

In general, if you have no reason for sticking to one version, don't stick to it. Flash 10, IE7, FF3, Chrome, Safari, Opera.

OS requirement is useless since it doesn't change anything to the browsing interpretation and experience.

Web compliance is a matter you want to consider for Search Engine Optimization, accessibility, compatibility...

For the flash version, you're safe targetting FP10, and you could even bump for 10.1: http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html

I'd specify AS3, as any design company still using AS2 for their flash needs as so far behind the curve that I wouldn't have confidence in their abilities.

Ignore browser compliance: it's flash, it just works.

Ignore OS compliance: it's flash, it just works (At the very least they should test it though).

Mobile: For the most part, if the phone supports flash, you should be fine. Where this is important though is optimisation (small file size for SWF and assets, good memory management, good speed, throttling the frame rate when it's not needed...). Depending on your site and what you do, take care with video etc. Basically, anything you see on Flash Site of the Day (http://www.thefwa.com/) is probably going to brick your phone, so it's really how important this is to you.

Web compliance: if you want your site to be indexable by Google etc, it takes extra work

Accessibility: if you want your site to be usable by special needs users (screen readers, keyboard-only navigation etc), it takes extra work.

Security flash cookies: not sure what you mean by this, but cookies are standard and probably done at a browser level rather than flash level (unless you're using shared objects for storing settings etc). In any case, it's not really a problem

Depending on how much flash is in the site (i.e. if it's a full flash site, or a html site with flash elements) these points become stronger or weaker - if you're including html in the bargain then you've different elements to look for. For the most part, the company should know all this stuff if they're any good.

Depending on how much content you have in your site, it may need an internal search (takes more work), or work with internal pages (i.e. it's possible to go to mysite.com/shop/item#blah and not be only able to go to mysite.com and have to manually navigate to the page every time)

A final point I'd put in is to make sure it's actually useful. Full flash sites that are just flashgasm intros and 20 minute long transitions betweens pages etc really suck. Hard. It might look cool but you'll hurt your business as for most people your site is useful if it's convenient.