Avoiding flash intro for return visitors

maybe a cookie or some such thing?

[moishe]

Howdy all,
I've never messed with cookies so go easy on me:)
I am building a site where the index page is a flash image, it has a skip intro button on it and all that.
My question is:
How do I set it up so return visitors will jump straight to my main page (main.html). I am coding in XHTML. If a cookie is the answer, how do I make one?
Thanks Ya'll
P.S. This forum has been the best resource I have ever found on the web!

[mep00]

I am building a site where the index page is a flash image,

This may not be what you want to hear, but with very rare excecptions, MacroMedia's advise on Flash intros is don't! A survey found around 80% hate Flash. There was no statistical difference betwenn broadband and dial-up (iirc, broadband was slightly higher).

The best was for you to avoid showing Flash the second time is don't show it the first. Flash is a good way to loose visitors. If you want to offer it as an option, go ahead, but make sure the default is off.

Don't get me wrong. Flash is very nice and has it's place, but the intro isn't one of them. Flash is a very nice thing to offer people, but it's a unplesent thing to force on people.

More people will probibly hit the back button instead of the skip. I'll repeat what I said before, MacroMedia, the owners of Flash, advise against it for intros.

Now that that's out of the way, there are realy only two ways to ID a user: login and cookies. For many of the details, check out [url]http://php.net[url].

The first thing you do is check if cookies are set using isset().

[tedster]

I agree with mep00 100%. Flash is great for demonstration modules, dedicated in-depth information, or one-off embedded animation like an ad. It's also a sweet way to put audio files on the web.

But a website is NOT essentially a passive medium like film or TV. It's an interactive medium and expecting even a first time visitor to sit passively through a "presentation" is just not, well, web-like.

I once did some work for a very big corporation. They created a Flash intro against my advice, but because of my caution they watched their metrics very closely. After 6 days, the $40,000 intro went into the bit-bucket never to return.

Make the Flash opt-in instead of opt-out and you never need to worry about cookies.

[edit_g]

The first thing a lot of users do when they see a flash intro loading up is to close the browser window and go somewhere else. The loading process may speed by on a fast connection but on a slower connection making people wait for something which isn't even what they came to your site for (they didn't come for an flash intro) is dangerous.

[moishe]

OK, I'm sold, scrapping the flash intro:)

[MaxedOut]

If a client is set on having a flash intro, I tell them to place a skip intro link in plain html below the flash. This will appear immediately and visitors can proceed into the site.