Using components has been one of the most incredible time saving “discoveries” I’ve ever made. It was about five years ago I guess, when i first tried one out. It was a Flash component for creating a form. If you’ve ever tried to build a good working form in Flash, then you know what a pain in the rump this is. I found a company who sold components (also know as “Flash extensions”) and tried one out. It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to use, but still only took me about an hour to put together the form for this site. Well, not bad… still much easier than building that form from scratch….

That success got me looking everywhere for more of the same…. Soon I was finding extensions for just about anything you can imagine from complex animated navigation to scheduling calendars, to full on photo galleries. It was amazing. Things which would have taken me weeks to code (assuming I even knew how to create them) I was getting done in an hour. Usually for about $29-$39. Money incredibly well spent. I even started using them for things which I had already built (and thus could import into my designs in minutes) simply because other people could do it better than I. Why re-invent the wheel, right?

One still must be careful when buying these extensions because I did find many which were more trouble than having simply built the feature myself…. but all in all, they are amazing time savers and allow you to bring new features to your site without becoming a Flash guru.

I would not be doing my job if I did not mention our own selection of Flash Components and Extensions on our site. At last count we had over 50 for sale. But I don’t want to just brag about ours…. When working in Flash don’t forget the little button in the main bar which goes to Adobe’s Flash Exchange. There you can find many other extensions from other vendors and even find free ones too. I’ve used many of those free ones in the past with relatively good success.