Introduction to Creating your Perfect Flash Site v1

I show you the steps you go through to create a Flash site. And like anything else you build, there is a process. Whether you’re creating a Flash site for your son’s baseball team or for your boss — who plopped an unopened box on your desk that says “Flash Professional 8” and said, “Build me a Flash site” — if you don’t approach the process logically, you’re destined to have more than your share of headaches. Like the self-help gurus say,” If you fail to plan, and you plan to fail.”

Flash vs. HTML

To Flash or not to Flash, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler to create a ho-hum HTML Web site or to up the ante with a Flash design with more bells and whistles than . . . but I digress.

Flash has been around for a long time. In comparison, HTML is almost ancient. Flash has gone through a rapid growth and development spurt since Flash 4. HTML is now in version 4.0 and won’t be developed anymore. In fact, HTML 4.0 has been around since 1998, which is practically the Jurassic age in regards to computers and Internet technology. Savvy designers have come up with all kinds of imaginative coding and workarounds to create some really cool Web sites with HTML. HTML designers use JavaScript to add interactivity to their designs. They write complex code to embed video and audio in their designs, and they use form elements to create interactive forms to gather information, to create virtual shopping carts, and so on. Or maybe they’re lucky and have a good WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML application, like Dreamweaver, that takes care of a lot of the grunt work.

Either way, there’s still a steep learning curve to create anything more complex than a hum-drum, text-only Web page sprinkled with the odd JPEG image or three. Simply put, modern-day Web designers need to know a lot. And they often have to resort to other colleagues in order to create the latest “all-singing, all-dancing” Web design that will blow the socks off their client’s competitors.

However, when you want to have your cake and eat it too, nothing beats Flash. You have everything you need within the application to add all of the interactivity and WOW factor the law allows, and then some. Lots of people think of Flash as a really cool animation tool. But it’s so much more than that. You can build high-powered, compelling Web sites with Flash. And the only time HTML comes into the picture is as the document within which you embed your Flash Web site.

Within Flash is a powerful scripting language known as ActionScript, which bears a similarity to JavaScript. If the design you envision includes fullmotion video, that’s available from within flash as well. In fact, Flash has its own video codec (an algorithm that compresses the movie when it is rendered, and decompresses the movie when it is viewed) called FLV (Flash Video). But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. You say you want to gather information from customers at your Flash site? Piece of cake! You can design an artistic Flash form that makes its HTML brother look positively archaic. And you can do all of this within Flash. I show you how to incorporate these elements and more in your Flash Web design in the upcoming article.