How This Book Works

Using a mythical community center gives us the opportunity to build a site that will incorporate many of the features your clients are, or soon will be, clamoring for in their sites. They would include a dynamic visit to the facility based on visitor interest, an online booking feature for facility use, and an online meeting facility for community outreach. This way, you can work with us to build three of the more common dynamic site features.

This book follows the building of a dynamic site from concept to upload to a server. Working with seven applications can be rather daunting, and the temptation would be to take the easy way out and present each product in isolation. That does you no good whatsoever, which is why we have broken the book into five sections that mirror the workflow of the Oakbridge site.

The first section, "Building Dynamic Sites," starts with an overview of what you are getting into, the tools you will use, and the skills necessary to build the site. We discuss the architecture of web applications and introduce you to our infamous "Pancake Principle" of building a dynamic site. We fully discuss the planning issues and the paper trail that must be built. We then discuss how to plan the logic and the flow of a dynamic site. Finally, we show you how to prototype a site (from site map to wireframes), and we conclude with a comprehensive design of the site for client review.

The second section of the book deals with building a dynamic facility tour. We show how the "art" toolsFireworks MX 2004 and Freehand MXcan create much of the content and how Flash MX 2004 and Dreamweaver MX 2004 use and display dynamic data. It is here, too, that we show you how to utilize the power of Cascading Style Sheets, build a database, configure ColdFusion for Dynamic Data, and use Flash Remoting to communicate with your database. The section finishes with the assembly and testing of the Tour.

The third section deals with the building of a booking facility; we show you both how to plan the section and how to create the assets used in the section. We then move into an area very few developers think of when it comes to building dynamic sitesusing Director MX, not Flash MX 2004for the task. We will show you how the applications in the Studio integrate with Director and discuss how to move data through Director MX using the Flash Communication Server. We haven't forgotten the Flash purists . The last chapter in the section explains how one would build the booking facility in Flash MX 2004.

The fourth section of the book builds an online meeting facility. Again, we show you how a number of the tools in the Studio can be used to construct the assets. Then we discuss how to design and build an online chat room with streaming audio and video capabilities.

The last section pulls the entire site together and focuses on assembly and alpha and beta testing. We examine usability and accessibility issues and finish up with deploying the site and using Macromedia Contribute to update the static pages and building a "back end" that updates the dynamic areas.

By the time you finish, you will have created a rather complex dynamic site, but, most important of all, you will have gained the confidence to take your skills even further.

Dynamic web site development, to many developers, is just like those progressive JPEGs we used to start this introduction. At first, the picture looks a little fuzzy, but, over time, the whole picture comes into focus. Building Dynamic Web Sites with Macromedia Studio MX 2004 does just thatit brings the building of these sites into focus and shows you how to have some fun along the way.