Become a Sprout Builder On The Web

A what?

Yes, it’s a valid question! Well, on the internet, Sprouts are advanced Flash based banners that come in all sizes, containing all sorts of media, can be 100% custom designed or based on a template and, like a paper leaflet, they can contain several independent pages.

Basically, a Sprout can be anything from a very simple banner to a very elaborate mini website.

If your imagination isn’t running wild yet at this point, let me give you some ideas! For example you can use a Sprout to promote your website, add a short description, a live feed and a URL back to your page. If you are an artist you can promote your work by adding sounds, videos, pictures, and much more. The Sprout can be posted on any website, on social network pages like MySpace or as a signature in a forum.

Sprout Builder is the free online tool that allows you to create Sprouts. Below is a Sprout that I created as a demonstration in less than five minutes with close to no knowledge and experience.

I’m hooked, get me started!

Let me tell you this, it’s VERY simple! If you have a basic understanding of image editing, and if you’ve ever worked with Photoshop (and pulled your hair out), you’ll not even need to read on, it’s that (much more) simple.

You can start without signing up. Once you’re happy with your first project and wish to save and eventually publish it, that’s when you will need to sign up for free. For now, you can just go ahead and give it a try, no strings attached.

Just click the GET STARTED! button in the top right, and then START BUILDING NOW! after reading the short note about compatibility and possible bugs. If you have IE 7, Firefox 2+, Safari 3+, as well as Flash 9 installed, you’re good to go.

First you’ll be asked to pick a template. If the blank slate scares you, pick any of the other preset templates to play around with. You can delete and add items anytime and make it your very own personal Sprout within the process. I’ll base my explanations on the Sports template.

Once you picked a template you can give the project a name and description. When this step is completed you can finally begin to enter the creative phase. This is what the virgin workspace looks like:

I’ll go through the menus from left to right. The Tools bar on the far left hopefully is self explanatory. Through Components you can add media, general stuff like a slideshow, a calendar, a news feed, a timer or countdown, and services such as Google Charts, a PollDaddy poll, Yahoo! Maps and much more. History should be clear and Properties allows you to customize the characteristics of any selected object. At the bottom you’ll see an overview of your Pages.

You can create things on your workspace outside the active Sprout area (white background). This is great for trying different things. Unfortunately, things outside the active area will not be automatically visible on all pages. However, you can easily copy and paste items using keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V).

Per default, you start out editing a content page and you won’t need the master pages, unless you wish to create a uniform look. There are two master pages, one for the foreground and one for the background, and their content will be visible on all content pages. So this is where you would add a common background, a logo, links to the other pages and things like that. Cross-linking to a content page is done through the Properties menu. In the Links & Tracking tab you check Page instead of URL and select the respective page.

Now, to add media, you’ll either need the URL of the file or upload it to your Assets. This unimpressive little Assets button sitting on top of your Sprout Builder workspace actually is a little pulldown page from where you can upload your media, i.e. images, videos, audio and flash movies.

So what you do is upload the media you want to use, then add the media placeholder through the Components menu, double-click the placeholder and drag & drop the respective media from your asset manager into the “Add Audio Media” window. You’ll see that each and every step is apparent and instructions are very clear.

You can publish your Sprout using the raw code or you can quick post it to one of the supported pages.

The coolest thing is that you can track your Sprout’s activity once it has been published! Check out the Reports section (red link in the top right of the page) and see how many times your projects have been viewed, posted and where your visitors came from.

I hope I could give you a good idea of what Sprout Builder is, how it works, and I’m sure you can work out the rest of the details on your own. Please let us know what you think, all feedback welcome! Also, I would love to see your results! Please send me links to your Sprouts, and if there’s an adorable example among them, or two or three, we will feature them here on Make Use Of. Be creative – ready, set, go!

(By) This post was written by one of our regular authors, Tina from Recommended.