Flash website -- VERY basic newbie questions

1

I have a basic website that I built in Dreamweaver ( Don’t laugh ) but after playing with Flash for a while now and doing alot of the tutorials and stuff I decided I want to make my site in Flash now. I need some rather basic questions answered that seem to be skipped over in most tutorials.

  1. Is it best to just make my layout in Photoshop, slice it up and import it into Flash as separate pieces/pictures (i.e. header, navbar, etc) or just make the layout and import it as one big picture? If its better to just create the site from scratch in Flash, then skip question #2, and if you could provide a link to how this is done because it seems the tools are little more basic in Flash compared to Photoshop to get the cool results on a lot of the Flash sites that I see.

  2. If I do make my layout in Photoshop, should I make it a detailed design and then bring it over to Flash or just a basic design and then detail it in Flash? What I mean is, do I put the text on the header, any special clickable areas detailed (image maps?).

  3. After I bring my template into Flash then do I publish it as my site from Flash or do I export/import it into Dreamweaver and publish it from there?

I followed the tutorial here at Kirupa.com on how to make a flash website and it shows me the structure of the site and how its put together once you have the parts but I guess my problem is getting the parts together in the first place.

Thanks in advance for any help, and if you don’t want to answer any of the questions then if you could please provide a link to where I might find some of these answers. I’ve searched Google and come up with all kinds of stuff on how to make the site but they all assume you have the graphics at your fingertips and ready to go.

rberry88

2

Your best bet for graphic design to be used in Flash is this:
– Either learn how to create graphics in Flash using its “basic” tools:
---- http://www.emptyproductions.com/flashWallpaper
---- I made each wallpaper 100% in Flash (so the tools work well once you know the basics)

– Or, create your graphics in Illustrator and export them as a SWF or copy/paste into Flash.

– Or, for those tricky graphics just import them as bitmaps and use them however.

The basis of Flash is its vector format, versus traditional bitmaps. So you’re going to want to have most/all of your graphics be vectors instead of bitmaps so that file size will be smaller, and image quality will be higher.

There are of course those images every so often that just can’t be done in vector (or they’re pictures). Then you have no other option but to import/paste the bitmaps into Flash.

One of your best bets is to get VERY good with the pen tool – it should be your best friend outside of the real world. :wink:

For publishing, you can just use Flash’s built-in publisher and export an HTML document that’ll have your movie embedded in it. You can modify the code using any text editor or WYSIWYG app, if further in-page modifications are necessary.

3

how did you do those soft transitions from a color to black?

4

It’s all just well-placed gradients. :slight_smile: