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Do you offer streaming media?
Can I have a web cam display on my site?
Do you support Flash?
Do you support Java?
How do movie files affect my bandwidth?
Can I play music on my website?
What programs do you recommend for creating graphics for the web?
What do you mean by ‘optimized’ graphics?

Do you offer streaming media?
We do not have a streaming server, however, we have many clients who play Real Audio and Real Video, as well Web Cams.

Can I have a web cam on my site?
You can have a web cam on your site.  However, the refresh time cannot be lower than every 5 minutes.

How do movie files affect my bandwidth?  
Movie files eat up bandwidth.  If you average movie is 2 megs and your visitors download it five times a day, then that's 10 megs a day equaling 300 megs in an average month.  For a Plan A account that's 1/3 of the allotted bandwidth. 

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Do you support Flash?
Yes.  We support Flash and Shockwave.

Do you support Java?
Coastline supports Java applets but not servlets, as executables are not allowed to operate on the server.

Can I play music on my website?
You can play Real Audio and regular background music (wav files) on your site.

What programs do you recommend for creating graphics for the web?  
There are many excellent graphics programs that fall within an enormous range of prices.  We haven't found any good free programs, but we have found great ones for under $60.  

• Photoshop is King for a reason.  It is the best overall program for digital graphics and photography.  We use Photoshop to optimize all of our web images and create the vast majority of buttons, bars, backgrounds, etc.  Photoshop has excellent capabilities for optimizing graphics.  

• Painter6 is the best for creating pure imagery.   Both of these programs are high end graphic programs (which means expensive, by the way).  If you are on a budget, don't give up.  There are some excellent programs that can be 1/5 the price.

• PaintShopPro is an excellent graphics program that offers many creative options and still keeps layers.  

• PhotoPlus6 is a much less expensive program than PhotoShop and offers some excellent features, as well.

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What do you mean by ‘optimized’ graphics?  
An optimized graphic is the smallest version that picture can be without being mush.  The exact formula varies by the image.  Generally, with a little manipulation in PhotoShop, you can take a 70K image (that could take 3 seconds alone to download) to 25K and still have the image look great.  It may not seem like much in terms of download savings, but if you have 5 images on your home page and each takes 3 seconds to download, your visitor is gone before your site is even done downloading.