Recipe for an excellent, functional Flash/HTML portfolio site

HI!

Just wanted a reminder on what backend and front-end components are mandatory for a successful Flash/HTML portfolio site. Anyone can put their resume on the site, and links to few websites they’ve done but I need to go beyond this basic approach. My old flash portfolio site (made 5 years ago) was a Flash movie embedded in a html container and it had links to other sites…there was no CSS or XHTML at all.

Also, I needed to find a way to learn AJAX/Ruby, so I thought maybe I could do that by applying it to the portfolio website. For those who have used AJAX/Ruby alongside with Flash, HTML, and CSS, how has it benefited your portfolio sites? Thanks.