Intro and Splash Pages
The worst thing you could do is to have a Flash splash page and inside the flash object there is the enter link. This mean, the each engine spiders can not access the enter link inside the flash object. Therefore, your splash page with the flash object will be the only page the search engine spiders will index and not the other pages.

It is okay if you don’t care about search engines indexing your content, but for the rest of us this is the biggest mistake anyone can do with SEO. Your homepage is likely the highest ranking page of the entire site. Why put any splash page there? There is no use for splash pages, unless you want the users to have the options to select which language they prefer, but other than that I don’t see any good use of a splash page.

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The creator of flash xml editor version 1 has recently released his brand new flash xml editor version 2 with all the improvements from the last version. There are now tons of new features and it is easier to use with better UI.

The version is still available here. But why buy the first one whe you can get the newer one with more features?

You can check out the demo here.

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You know I been waiting for a very long time to finally find a content management system for my flash websites and it doesn’t cost thousands of dollars. At last I have found a great CMS called Flash XML Editor version 1. You can buy it at FlashDen.net

If you are a web designer you will love this tool. I love it because I dont really need to do any xml scripting, all I have to do is just make sure my flash website can be modify by a XML file. When you have a website that can be modify by a XML file you can easily use this Flash XML Editor to modify your XML file.

Of course if you wrote your XML file and built your flash website, you don’t need this tool. This tool is great if you have a customer that doesn’t know xml and you can integrate this Flash XML Editor to the website and have your customer use it.

The UI is pretty straight forward; you can add photos, delete photos, add or remove pages. The best part is that, you don’t need to open your flash application to do all the content updates.

The Flash XML Editor Version 2 is already out a few months ago, but I haven’t bought it yet because I don’t need one right now and I can’t wait to try it out. Once I have version, I’ll post it here in the future. It is much more robust and easier to use than the version 1.

Here is the screen capture of the Flash XML Editor.

This is a little tutorial for Flash button. I found out about this trick on my own by accident when I was building my Flash home page back in 2004.

I needed a way to disable a button when I have another object floating on top of the button. I notice that I can disable the button underneath when there is another button on top.

Anyways, just take a look at the two examples I have below to see what I mean.

Try to drag the grey box under the blue button and place it over the blue button. Notice you can still activate the blue button.

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I have been using a few web hosting companies in the past few years and I just wanted to share some of my experiences here. Maybe this might be helpful to someone looking for a good web hosting company or stay away from one.

Today there are thousands of web hosting companies around the world, but I am only going to review 4 I have used and currently using.

Here is one of my favorite web hosting forum I use to do my research. http://www.webhostingtalk.com/

Lastly, before signing up with any web hosting company. I HIGHLY recommend that you don’t pay for a full year at once. I know it is very enticing seeing that you would save some money if you sign up for 1 or more years, but you will be better off if you sign up and only pay monthly. That way if you don’t like the support or performance you can always cancel and it won’t cost you a bundle. Another reason to pay monthly is that down the line there might be something wrong with your server (hack, crash, over sell…) you may leave at the end of the month.

Also find a company that has at least 30 days money back (all good ones have this).

My Reviews

1. Host Gator Web Hosting Review (highly recommended)


2. Brinkster Web Hosting Review (not recommended)


3. Webair Web Hosting Review (not recommended)


4. Dream Host Review (not recommended)

The Pros and Cons about Flash websites.

Pros:

1. Freedom – Any good flash designer can do anything he/she wants. The only limit is their imaginations, skill and time.
2. Can embed any fonts and it will show up on anyone’s computer as long as they have a flash player install in their computer.
3. Flash is equip with bundle of tools for artists to use to create stunning animations.
4. Compatible with all browsers and all PC or Mac computers – all you need is the flash player.

Cons:

1. My biggest beef with Flash is the fact that it is not search engine friendly. There are ways to do this but I still find it very complicated. This is the main reason why I don’t recommend building a full website with flash. Unless you don’t care about having your entire content index by search engines.
2. The other thing I hate about flash is that I find it hard to update. For example, you can put action scripts on timeline, or put your action scripts on a movie clip or action scripts inside a movie clip inside a movie clip loading from an external movie clip, and so on. It is such a headache if you have to update a Flash website that was built by someone else and you have no idea where everything is located.
3. Not much content management system available (if any). All the CMS I can find with flash cost hundreds of dollars and some even thousands of dollars and I would doubt any of those expensive Flash CMS are as robust as other HTML/CSS open source CMS like Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal, and many others.
4. Can’t use back or forward buttons on the browser. There are ways around it with JavaScript and action script but I also find it complicated.
5. Flash can’t separate design from content like html and css. This is another season why Flash is so much harder to update and maintain.
6. Action Script changes from one version to the next. AS1 then AS2 now AS3.
7. Browsers need flash player (most browsers already come with this install) and it only takes seconds too install, not a big deal.
8. Flash can’t install on iPhone. Apple don’t want flash install on their iPhones because Adobe is one of Apple’s competitor. Blah!
9. Cost more $$$ to build because Flash takes more time to build and harder to update.

To give you some examples. I remember a website called www.roadrunner.com or www.rr.com, which is own by Time Warner Inc. They are an Internet service provider, so you would think they would know something about websites.

Back around 2003, they rebuilt their website and it was entirely made with Flash. (I think Flash 6) I read an article somewhere at that time and saw the cost to built their Flash website was over 3 million dollars.(I’m still looking for that article so I can post a link here.) But if you go to their website now you can see their is no more Flash. It is now a css website.

More info on the roadrunner website here on wiki.

One more example why Flash suck. Check out this Flash forum called www.ultrashock.com. This is one of the biggest Flash forum I can think of. A few years ago this was all Flash, now if you go to the forum you can see it is no longer Flash.

I have nothing against Flash, I’m one of those people that used to love it and would do everything in Flash, but now I found a better and more efficient way to built my websites. Now I try to stay away from Flash as much as I can.

Let’s say you have 3 buttons inside of flash that link to different web sites and you want to be able to update those links without having to open the .fla file to decompile and then upload the .swf file.

With the action script below you can easily open the external .txt file and edit the links without ever having to open flash.

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