Building a website in Flash

[EmJayDesign]

Hi,
I am building a website in flash for a client ... I was reading a little onlnie and see that people do not reccommend building a site entirely in flash. I am very unfamiliar with Dreamweaver and other web programs and know how to use Flash very well. Is there anything I should keep in mind , any tips to best build a site in Flash ? For example keep them whole thing within a certain file size ? The site has a lot of photos which I am using rollover thumbnails to preview them.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!!

Thanks

[TORCH511]

The rule about not building web sites in flash is getting kind of outdated. That logic was brought about back in the day when a lot of people did not have the Flash plugin downloaded.

I would recommend doing a Flash/browser compatibility check when loading the site, and do that in an HTML page. Should the browser be compatible redirect to the flash site, and should there be a problem, give the option to download and install, and have an HTML site as a backup.

[EmJayDesign]

Thank you for your reply.
I was getting nervous...

Just one question, what file size should I keep my flash file at to make sure download time will not be too slow ? Any advice about that?

Thanks

[CurtisMcHale]

The don't build in flash idea also was because until last week search engines couldn't read a flash file. Google is now able to index a flash file as long as the links are in text not images. Yahoo is working on it. No news on how close Microsoft or other search engines are to indexing flash.

I don't believe that there are any web analytic programs that can pull stats off of flash files either (though I may be wrong). So a client may not see the clicks and get good data on their site as far as usage goes.

I personally don't love flash because I think people use it way more then they should. It is not the answer for every client. I have seen many flash sites that do nothing more than HTML/CSS and wonder why they were done in Flash.

As far as file size consider making the site in two seperate files. 1/2 of the site in one file 1/2 in another file. Will cut the size of the download for people. I would try to keep any file under .5MB at a max. Although if you are building for a client like EA games it may be safe to assume that people would be on fast computers with fast internet connections. It really depends on what market the site is presented to.

[EmJayDesign]

Thanks for the info, thats good to know that Google will be able to index flash sites .

Question on what you said about creating 1/2 the file as one flash site and half as the other/... how do you do this and able to connect the 2 ? I am not clear on what you mean by this.

Also the entire site should be .5 mb?? Do you mean the .swf file or the .fla file ? Because if you mean the .fla file I am already way over that. I have alot of images that have been compressed as much as possible but it still all adds up, I was wondering maybe if you have ideas how to get the file size so small.

Thanks again everyone for all your help.