Hello All,

I'm helping a friend work on his website, and I need some help myself now. As opposed to building a site from scratch I pointed him to Template Monster so in the essence of time we could just gut one. Once there of course the shiny ball that is Flash seduced him. He is hell bent that he wants one of those fully Flash animated sites, where every click or hover of your mouse will produce some effect. I've worked with Flash intro's in the past and didn't foresee this being a problem. However right after unzipping the source files from TM I could see right away I am out of my element.

When I opened it up I saw there was not only a "site" file but at "site_flash" file. Upon further inspection it looks like in the "site" file there's what the site would look like with no Fash animation. In the "site_flash" file I run the SWF file and it looks like the whole site done up in Flash. This is where I'm confused, is the "site" file just the non-Flash version of the site in case we want to run that instead or for non-Flash browsers? Or does it work like layers, you put the HTML non-Flash site down and all the Flash animation, in a sense, lays on top of it?

I'm worried I may have bit off a little more then I can chew. I was thinking I'd just go in edit this template with my friends information and I'd be done in a week. I'm hoping someone can help me make sense of what I'm looking at. If it helps here's the link from TM's site explaining what's in the source file: http://www.templatemonster.com/help/...article10.html

Welcome to WMT!

There is no such thing as a "flash web site" - flash movies/animations are usually items of content that are embedded into a web page using any one of a few methods. You can also use flash to display other media such as video.

With the files you obtained you should have one or more .fla files, it's these that you need to edit to chnage the content of the flash movie.

Write your site using normal HTML/CSS first, then offer the Flash file(s) to your visitors as needed.

This is where I'm confused, is the "site" file just the non-Flash version of the site in case we want to run that instead or for non-Flash browsers? Or does it work like layers, you put the HTML non-Flash site down and all the Flash animation, in a sense, lays on top of it?

For the search engines, they can't read flash animation.

That is no longer true. Google at least CAN read REAL TEXT inside of Flash. The problem is, most people convert their real text to shapes or just objects so they cannot be read, so they are useless to search engines.

Originally Posted by blue-dreamer

Welcome to WMT!

There is no such thing as a "flash web site" - flash movies/animations are usually items of content that are embedded into a web page using any one of a few methods. You can also use flash to display other media such as video.

With the files you obtained you should have one or more .fla files, it's these that you need to edit to chnage the content of the flash movie.

Write your site using normal HTML/CSS first, then offer the Flash file(s) to your visitors as needed.

Thank you so much, this is exactly the explanation I was looking for!