Flash based website basics, first steps, good practices

Question

I have a bit of Flash experience, did a full featured movie player, other stuff in AS3 and got plenty of programming skills in other languages, BUT now I need to create a multi paged website. Quite easy, a few pages, some animations here and there, nothing fancy, got all the graphics. But time is short on this one, so I need some advice about good practices (pack everything into one main MC or make separate swfs and load them in, etc.), where to begin, or what kind of book should I grab to make the job pretty.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I did a website at:

http://www.yogurtvibes.com

It is all in Flash. It is a pretty simple architecture.

I create individual page components as SWF files, then I put all of the actual site content into XML format and call up a section's content as needed, duplicating the SWF component templates where required.

So, instead of creating 24 movieclips to hold 24 entries of a certain kind of item info, I created a single SWF template and instantiate it on the stage as needed, populated with data pulled from my XML.

Once I had all the different kinds of modules/template SWF files completes, I simply created a universal holder MC that I could populate with a particular "pages" section.

This gives me a few advantages: 1. I can update the SWF modules individually without disrupting the entire site. 2. Once I create a module, the entire site (everywhere that uses it) is updated. 3. It allows for the user to go in an add/delete content from their site without any Flash on their part.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Check out my deepsplink framework. It is designed to create full flash sites quickly. Here is a getting started tutorial. I hope this helps.