Flash design is a great way to jazz up your site and to draw the attention of the visitor. A well made flash site will ensure that a visitor remembers your site in the future, and will possibly refer to it again. Examples of great flash sites are miniclip which has thousands of popular flash games, and is coded in flash itself.



Flash design seems easy, what with umpteen tutorials on the internet but the truth is, a hastily made flash design can break your site. There are a lot of factors you have to keep in mind before you are on your way to a good flash design. I explain some of the following below:

1. Ensure scalability and compatibility with different screen resolutions. In an age when bigger and better screens are released every week, you need to ensure that your flash design doesn't get stretched on a bigger screen. It should be able to resize itself according to a smaller or higher screen resolution than on what it was designed on. Larger screens can cause distortion of the template and smaller screens can cause wrapping. It makes life very difficult for the viewer as the content lands up in weird positions.

2. Ensure compatibility with all browsers. This aspect of flash design is very important if you want to come up with the best flash design. Earlier, only Internet Explorer was prevalent in the market, but these days you have browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome competing for market space. This results in people using different browsers accessing your site and if it doesn't display uniformly on all of them, it will give a highly negative impression about the design.

3. Make your site....fast! Yes, this is really important. No one likes to wait for hours for a site to load. And I am not just talking of file sizes; there are a couple of other measures you can take to make your site load faster, especially for repeated visitors. Firstly though, you must keep the file size small anyway. Opt for a medium frame rate, nothing too high, and nothing so low as to seem like bad quality.

Secondly, go for Server Side Include (SSI) files. These are files stored in the machine cache so they are retrieved almost instantaneously when the person visits the site again. Also, remove unwanted and repeated code to clean up the code and make it easier to read and execute.

4. Make use of material on the internet. It's free, why not use it? You'll find tutorials on basically each and every Flash design technique ever invented, and you can keep playing video's again and again till you finally get it right. The web is the best resource for designing and you can find hundreds of forums frequented by thousands of people who have the same bent of mind as you. Not only will you find like minded people there, you'll get answers to your problems from people who have faced such problems and have found solutions to them!