When it comes to creating web-based, interactive communications that engage your visitors and drive them to action, which technology is best to use?

We get this question from marketers a lot. The answer depends on what’s important to you. How rich is your content? How interactive do you want your user experience to be? And with which browsers and devices do you need to be compatible with?

As interactive designers, we look to use new technology to make content more clear, more compelling and more accessible. We also look to leverage assets across media types, reducing time and costs. Finally, we consider what devices you want to support now and in the future. And that’s a BIG finally.

Technology companies have not made it simple for both the creators of content and the viewers. Each technology has its pros and cons.

Flash is a plug-in-based technology. It doesn’t matter if your users are running FireFox web browser on their Android phones or Microsoft Internet Explorer on their office computers. With Flash Player 10.1 you get about the same experience no matter the device or browser. But there’s a gotcha. Some devices, I’m looking at you, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, don’t support browser plug-ins. Then you’re sunk.

Ajax is the combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, sometimes referred to as Web 2.0. It allows you to add some interactivity. You won’t be able to create the full-browser environments you can with Flash, but you will be able to add enough interactive touches and immediate feedback to engage your audience all while maintaining some level of compatibility from earlier Internet Explorer versions to the iPad.

HTML5 is the next major revision of the HTML standard, as the 5th major release of updates to the language. Imagine all the interactivity of Flash without the browser plug-in. But HTML5 is a work in progress and isn’t expected to be final until 2012 (fingers crossed). Authoring tools are only just beginning to trickle in. And to top it all off, HTML5 will never be compatible with any version of Internet Explorer prior to IE9. But with backers like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe, the future clearly belongs to HTML5.

New technologies and media bring new opportunities for companies to connect with customers. So until the tech companies decided to play nice, we’ll keep testing for our clients and asking the question… “What matters most to your audience?”

I love comfort food — the familiar flavors, simple ingredients, and all that food on the plate! According to food trend experts, comfort food is IN. Bonny Wolf, food commentator for NPR, states that food trends in 2009 are “colored by the economic recession”. She adds, “We’re in uncertain times, and this is the time when we crave comfort food.”

So what does comfort food have to do with flash product demos, the meat and potatoes of your marketing toolkit? Three words come to mind “Comfort, Simplicity and Value.”

Comfort

Like the rich flavors my nana simmered into every pot of chowder she made from simple ingredients, a product demo has to be more than a sequence of bland screenshots and voice over track pieced together. Instead, it is a seasoned recipe including branding elements, on-screen messaging and supporting imagery. These elements come together with sound and motion to communicate the features and functions of your product and express the unique flavor of your company establishing credibility, competence, and familiarity.

Simplicity

Restaurants are serving up simple, home-style dishes like pasta with meat sauces or meatloaf with mashed potatoes to ease diners back to their tables. These uncomplicated dishes serve up plenty of flavor while saving prep time and costs. CGI sees Marketing and Product Managers craving simplicity as they shoulder more responsibilities and fewer resources. Our flash demo template solution offers a simple process, saving time and money. The result: a compelling product demo in formats compatible for tradeshow use, online broadcasting, and socializing on the web.

Value

In college, breakfast at the Shawmut Diner was my favorite meal of the week and worth every penny at $6.99! The huge quantity of good food beyond satisfied my hunger at a price that would make my Nana proud. Designed to be scalable, with source files as part of the fixed price, makes the solution like ordering the Breakfast Special! With the ability for Google Analytics to be cooked right in, your can track your investment.

I guess you could say our new Flash product demo template solution is comfort food for savvy marketers looking for value without sacrificing quality or effectiveness. Check out some samples of recent demo we have created using our fixed-priced, template solution and tell us what you think.

1000 or 1,000? The number is pretty easy to decipher regardless, so get off my back about the commas, right? How about 1000000 or 10000000? This is where the sweet, sweet comma can really come in handy.

Recently we built an opportunity assessment calculator for a client. The tool allowed our client’s sales force to work with retail managers and determine how they could increase profitability with their e-commerce enabled website. The tool allowed sales to show, in dollars and cents, what small improvements and changes could mean to their bottom line. Awesome for the client, kinda strenuous for the developer (moi) because numbers need to constantly change from a bare bones format that make AS3′s math functions happy, to a beautiful looking piece of art that might appear on a bank statement.

Adding in a dollar sign is easy, but how to add commas!? Being that AS3 offers virtually no support for number formatting I found myself cruising the private sector; reading one code monkeys opinion after another. While I found plenty of functions, it seemed like they all made assumptions on what the expected input would be. No numbers larger than 9999, no negative numbers, no decimal points, etc. I finally tossed on the ol’ headphones and cranked out my own addCommas function. It accepts a real number as an input and spits back the same number as a string with commas.

Have fun, make sure to have her home by ten: