8 Ball Web Productions

This tutorial is won't teach you how to design, because no matter how effort I give into it, taste can't be taught. The site design is a thing you have to do for yourself. This tutorial is about making a site that has low file size and fast loading time.

First thing's first, the buttons should never be GIFs or JPGs, reason 1 they are not vector graphics, meaning that every pixel has a lot of information, where a vector graphic button(button's made and drawn alike in flash) has few mathematical informations and even when you zoom in it still shows the crispy quality.

Now, for the background, this is the place where you can actually input JPGs because, first... they save design time, second they are usually constructed out of one image. Meaning they wouldn't take much space anyway. If you want to make animation for background then I would advise you to use vectors again, because tweening JPGs and BMPs make the movie slow to run on computers older then 4 that are at high FPS. Keep in mind, FLASH files(.swf) run entirely on the power of the CPU, and not the GPU(Graphics Card such as GeForce).

For photos(not background images) of course we can't use vector, so it's either JPG or BMP. For best results you should edit your images with photo editing program such as Adobe Photoshop CS2(earlier versions should do good) and save the images with quality up to 7(PS users) if you put it up to 12 the eye can't tell difference from JPG images smaller then 400x400px.

Lastly, for music. If you want to run music in your background the best way is to import it from another .swf file to your main movie with the call action loadMovie("/name.swf");. The best way to go is with MP3 files they are usually(always) smaller then waves and are also supported by Flash. The only thing you have to make shure is that the web server host has support for MP3 upload.

I haven't put up info on text because text never takes up much space, I can only tell you what's the best time saving feature of flash for updating the site. It's called the dynamic text box, you can insert Action Script to load external vars. from a .txt file into .swf and once you upload it to the web along the text all you have to do to update your site is change the content of the text file.

This tutorial was more of a advice 'n' tips. Flash kit has a great library of tutorials you can find on how to make the Dyanmic Text boxes and inserting other external files.

Please excuse any mistakes I have made in the spelling, English is not my first language.

I hope this will be good help for people who are new to the world of digital design and Flash works.

Thank You
Soni Romanov - SONIWORKS®