Being the innovator and the flagship in the Web Design Industry FlashMint continues bringing new technologies and revolutionary products to give you the most outstanding and convenient web solutions. Thus, today we are announcing the launch of the most ingenious web product that will make the development and maintenance of a website as easy and fun as the kids’ game is. Please welcome - Website Constructor.

I bet everyone played with the Lego constructor at childhood. Do you remember how fun it was? Well, building a website is now as much fun! From now on you do not need ANY programming skills and technical knowledge to develop a perfect website. Seriously. You do not have to pay loads of money to edit and maintain your website, you do not need to hire tech-savvy designers and developers any more, now you can do everything yourself.

Super scalable multipurpose XML flash template

Do you remember how a house is built? The first thing needed to build a house is a basis. Website constructor plays this role here. What is the next thing needed to build a house? You are right - bricks. The components play the role of bricks in building a website. Thus everything you need to do to get yourself a perfect online house is a site constructor for the basis and flash components to build the walls-site pages upon it. FlashMint offers 8 components now. These first 3 components are the most essential things no website can be built without:

1. Text field
This is a simple HTML page you can put anything on. You can have an unlimited amount of pages with any info you may need to give to your visitors - pictures, your bio, about us page etc.

2. News feed
All the components of this type are dynamical to create a vivid presentation of your latest news. You can choose colors, add pictures and resize your news feed to suit your website perfectly.

3. Contact form
To let your visitors reach you and give their feedback you’ll need a contact form. We offer you the most brilliant components for this task. Till today you needed to have php skills to add a contact form to the site or pay load of money to someone who can do the task for you. Now you can do everything yourself. Easily change colors, add and edit texts and contact information within your contact form.

Well, these were 3 most essential components you’ll need to have a functional website. If you plan to develop a creative online presence you may need these components:

1. Picture gallery
If you plan to build a personal page, or a portfolio, or even an online showcase of the products you sell this is the most necessary component you need. The picture galleries created at FlashMint let you easily resize and edit your images, add and remove pictures and categories, change the color of the gallery and thus give you the full control over your pictures and their presentation at your website.

2. Music gallery
As the picture gallery for photographers this component is important for the musicians. Building a personal page for your band you’ll need to let everyone easily listen to your music online. The music galleries from FlashMint let you add as many mp3 tracks and albums as you wish to. If you want to create a great personal page and share you favorite music with your visitors you’ll love this component as well.

3. Video gallery
You can add an unlimited number of your videos, clips and movies to your website with this component.  You can divide your videos to the categories, thus creating a comprehensive archive.The component works with .flv video format which is one of the most popular video formats.

4. Slide show
If you want your visitors to notice your selected pictures or your best products show them with the vivid slide show.

5. Staff page
This component allows you to create a gallery showing you and your company or family photos and giving your brief bios to let your clients and visitors to know who you are. I believe it is the most creative way to let the world know you

All these components are extremely easy to add and edit. You won’t have any problems with doing it yourself, we’ve put a lot of time and effort to make it intuitive ans simple for you. Besides the described above components FlashMint will soon add the Event Calendar, Shopping Cart and Flex Admin Panel components to give you the fullest control over your website. And what is the most pleasant about it all - the full package will cost you no more than $60.

Build your web house in no time and have fun!
P.S. Do let us know what features would you like to have on your website and we’ll develop components for you. We want to give you an opportunity to build the most perfect functional website you ever dreamed about.

If you own a website for some time you know how often the desire to improve something here and to add something there comes. Of course you can redesign your website completely, but there is a far more easy and cheap solution - Flash components.
You already know what Flash components are, but just to remind you - these are ready-made Flash files, applications and extensions aimed to help you enhance your existing HTML, CSS and Flash websites, add functionality to them and endue your website with more incredible features and live action. There is a huge number of Flash components, including menus, image viewers and galleries, buttons, navigation systems, video and music players, effects, icons and illustrations, animations, preloaders and scrollbars, news readers and banner rotators etc. Today I’m going to showcase the most creatively designed Flash components from FlashMint collection.

If you plan to add an image gallery to your website to show your art works to your visitors than these Flash components will be of special interest for you:

3D 2 level XML gallery flash component

3D slider XML gallery flash component

These two Flash components are created with the use of 3D technology. They most likely will impress any picky visitor. Designed in a futuristic manner these image galleries will emphasize the creative beauty of your photos and images.

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Following the subject of Best Photography Flash Templates it appears that Photo Portfolios are never too much, they are among the most popular web designs. I assume the reason of this popularity of online photo galleries lies in the huge popularity of the photography itself. People tend to capture the most important events of their lives and their every day life, their vacancies and birthdays, people they meet and places they visit and as much natural is their desire to share these memories and precious captured moments with other people. Thus, as the demand on the Photography templates is not falling but on the contrary - increasing we are giving you another showcase of the most fresh and brilliantly designed Flash website templates aimed for creating online photo portfolios from FlashMint designers.

It so happened that most of the chosen web templates are Flash CMS v3. This revolutionary technology developed by FlashMint experts give the photographers incredible opportunities that were impossible before; among the key features are the unlimited amount of created pages, comfortable Flex Admin Panel, unlimited number of galleries and wonderful ability to edit photos directly at the web page and an amazing feature of adding title and description to the home page which makes your online portfolio SEO friendly and thus closer to success and huge number of visitors. Flash CMS v3 templates are the most ingenious solution if you dream to create a SEO friendly, easily to edit and maintain photo portfolio.

Flash photo gallery CMS v3 template

This online portfolio template is a marvelous example of the latest web design trends perfectly embodied in the product. The use of vintage and old school design elements makes this Flash CMS v3 template not only up to the minute but also very personal and nostalgic, creating the atmosphere of good old days and giving your visitors the feel of comfort and coziness.

Online photo portfolio CMS v3 flash template

Designed with the use of blue color palette this Flash template is perfectly suitable for any type of photography you enjoy creating - from wedding photos to still life and concert photos.

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Last week has been fruitful for interesting posts, thus we decided to share some of them with you. If you missed these posts by any chance do read them, we think you might find them useful and worth reading.

Microsoft To Sell Windows 7 Without IE in Europe: Odd and Unnecessary at Mashable

Stan Schroeder discusses with his readers the announcement that Windows 7 is going to be released without the browser installed. It’s really odd from Microsoft, we all understand Stan’s frustration here. But whether it’s good or bad is up to you of course.

Smashing magazine always gladdens us with the useful articles, incredibly inspiring showcases and great sets of useful things every designer appreciates. Last week they had two fruitful posts that we’d love to share with you:

50 Fresh Useful Icon Sets For Your Next Design

Free stuff is always useful, isn’t it? This selection features 50 free sets of icons including Web Application Icon Sets, E-Commerce Icon Sets, Free Multimedia Vector Icons, 172 final country flag icons, Symbol Signs, Social Icon Sets and General Icon Sets. There are big and tiny icons for every purpose. I especially liked the Social Icon Sets, some very cute pics there.

Effective Strategy To Estimate Time For Your Design Projects

Have you ever been late for the deadline with a project? Sam Barnes suggests a brilliant strategy to estimate the time so you can arrange the proper deadline with your clients. We find these tips to be very useful. Of course every designer has his own style of work and formulas to calculate the time needed for the project, Sam Barnes offers a way to make your calculations more accurate.

Why Designers Should Learn How to Code at SixRevisions

The article by John Urban gives few reasons why you should learn to code your designs. Personally I think the designer shouldn’t do the work of a developer. Of course if you know how to do everything from A to Z your value is higher, but being honest will you do everything as good as you would do one single thing? I think a designer should know how to design a page that will be easy to code but shouldn’t code it himself. Read the article and a discussion below it and make up your personal opinion.

The last two links we are going to share with you tonight are showcases of truly inspiring pictures.

40 Examples of Incredible Photo Manipulation from WebDesignerDepot.

Some of the showcased here photos really amaze, one has to be either a magician or a true master of Photoshop to create something alike.

23 Striking Examples Of Nature Photography Through The Photographer’s Eye at SmashingApps

It always amazes how some people see the incredible where no one else sees it. Nature is all around us, but can you be proud of taking such breathtaking pictures of it?

Well, this is what we’ve been reading last week. Do not hesitate to share what you think is worth reading in the comments below.

When we say Flash templates we mean FlashMint, when we say FlashMint we mean Flash products (Flash design, flash websites, Flash CMS, Flash components). Everyone knows how extremely interactive and visually impressive Flash designs are. Well developed Flash websites require little bandwidth and are usually real masterpieces that are able to carry the viewer to the world of designer’s fantasy and unbelievable reality. Though being in the business for a while we constantly come across strange misbeliefs considering Flash in web design, thus today I’m going to bust those myths to give you more confidence in Flash.

#1 Flash is not SEO-friendly

This is a common misbelief that search engines like Google can not read the Flash texts. In fact Google does read inside Flash for a long time already. Here’s an article on the theme written back in 2004!

And here Adobe itself explains how SEO and Flash work together.

#2 Flash is slowly loading

Yes, Flash was slow…. ages ago. Nowadays Flash supports such data transfer/storage technologies like SWX, Native XML, SOAP, etc and the general access to broadband Flash is loading very fast. Of course if the code has been written by someone incompetent Flash may be really slow.

#3 Only few people have Flash player installed
Yes, Flash website can work only if the user has Flash player installed. But I can’t imagine where this odd myth that only few people have it installed has come from. In fact Flash is immensely popular. Of course there are groups of people that do not have Flash player and even do not know what it is, but this groups won’t be even 1% of Internet users, and do you really think these people might be your targeted audience?

#4 The content is not separated from presentation

Of course someone who is really incompetent and new to Flash development may write a mess, but experienced developers use XML for content, for presentation they use Flash movie clips and for behavior external ActionScript files. And believe me we at FlashMint do not have inexperienced and incompetent developers.

Hope the myths are busted for you, there’s no reason to not use Flash if you want your website to be unique and possess the awesome features that only Flash can give.