I haven’t done web design for a few years now. Last I got into it, I was pretty heavily into Flash – or rather, the wonderful little combo of Flash+PHP+MySQL. This seemed to cover most all of the bases for creating any serious interactivity you wanted on a website – your Flash could handle any UI stuff, PHP and Actionscript doing the logic, MySQL dealing with any of the “back-end” type stuff.
Anyway, fast-forward to now, and I’m in a position where I have to create an “interactive website” again. While I haven’t been active in the web design/programming sphere, I’ve certainly observed it, and one of the things that’s struck me is how many damn “frameworks” seem to be popping up these last few years. So many that individual companies like Adobe, for example, seem to have multiple, competing frameworks (let’s see – you got AIR…uh, Flash…and whatever the hell “Flex” is?). PHP seems to have been trumped (partly) by the much ballyhooed appearance of Ruby. No, wait, its Ruby on Rails! And on and on.
<Mops brow> Ok. Here’s my question: what should I actually pay attention to? What should I use? I want a site that (a) gives me complete control over layout and graphics. (b), I want as much interactivity as possible – if I feel like having cheesy animations (don’t worry, I’m not one of Those Flash People), I can. ©, I want it to be slick. The site I’m doing is absolutely centered around media. High-end, real-time graphics. Music. The whole shebang. That’s what the company does – so the website has to be at least SOMEWHAT reflective of this…meaning it has to be both aurally and graphically-impressive.
Designers, developers, countrymen – your thoughts?