Tips for Centering a Flash Object When Developing a Web Page

Search engine optimization (SEO) enthusiasts have created a lot of controversy around whether or not using Flash objects in the design of a web page is a good idea. Flash can bedazzle the visitor with sound, animation and an overall feast for the eyes. But, some of the work that designers/developers put into a Flash presentation gets lost depending upon what type of browser a visitor is using.

Some say that Flash animations are annoying and detract from the real content of a website. Other SEO experts indicate that a developer should learn to use "work-arounds" by designing two different sites for the same project - one site that is Flash enabled and another site that is not. This work-around would allow visitors to decide whether or not they want to see a Flash presentation when they visit a website and still allow search engine indexing programs to fully spider the site. The SEO argument and work-around are important to consider particularly because there are still many web users who do not connect to the internet using a high speed access.

So it becomes even more important to be able to place text on a web page and at the same time position Flash objects appropriately. But even with this work-around, finding the right HTML code that helps a Flash
developer make best use of his/her animation the for a web project can be frustrating. A simple "centering an object" search on the Adobe Flash website returns 275 results. None of which are particularly useful for achieving the goal of centering a Flash object.

Finding the right HTML code for a web project can be frustrating. Often new website developers who have problems centering objects on webpages give up too soon leaving the page looking unattractive.

To make web content pleasing to the eye, it is important that a Flash object is centered perfectly on the page.

To do this quickly, follow these easy steps:

1) Within the coding section of your web editor software, type the code that is in Illustration 1 just before the object code:

2) The code in Illustration 1centers everything that appears after it. But, we only want to center the object. So, now we must tell the browser to stop centering all of information on the page and only center the Flash object. To do this, type the code that is in Illustration 2 just after the end of the object code.

Illustration 3 shows an example of what the above might look like if you are in coding mode within your web editor.

That's all there is to it!