Any planners or planning students have their own website. I am looking for something a little more professional than a myspace page. In addition to my full time planning job, I do planning work on the side on a contract basis. Developing my own flash site. Just want to get some ideas as to what others are doing (can also include architects, landscape architects, engineers, you get the picture). Does not need to be flash, can be html, xml, etc.
I don't have one, nor do any of the folks I commiserate with, however I would not recommend designing a flash-based site as your post seems to indicate you might be wanting. Flash is cumbersome and quite annoying for many people, especially in the professional world.
I can understand the concern with Flash websites. I think too many websites on the internet that utilize this software place a high emphasis on animations, including wasting a lot of time and money on the otherwise pointless intro flash animation.
I have read a few articles and glanced over a few books on award-winning flash websites. The most effective websites are those that use animations very very sparingly, have text and graphics that are easy to read and well balanced. IMO, the success of any website is most dependent on the download time. I think it is difficult to this when people have a variety of browsers, including older versions of popular browsers, such as Internet Exlorer and Netscape Navigator or even non-windows browsers.
I originally started to do my work in Dreamweaver, but this software does not have animations, although it allows flash objects to be added, the overall product is not as "fluid". As a personal style choice, I like to have a couple of moving lines, and shapes within the webpage as transitions from one page to the next. I try to restrain the animations, and Flash seems to be the most responsive to my style (as opposed to Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage).
Another alternative I have explored is to have a very basic internet website, but to place the selected samples on CD's/DVD's. This way my portfolio is not all over the internet. I have collected a bunch of CD sample portfolios from booths of rival firms at trade shows. I might do all of my portfolio on CD's or bizcard CD's (business card shaped CD-Rom's of less than 50mb) and distribute them with potential clients.
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