Tips and quick advice

Before you get started, try considering the following rules to help you, the designer produce a site worthy of your end users attention.

Know your audience

Research where ever possible about your audience. Do they have fast or slow connection to the net? What kind of hardware and software do they use? You need this knowledge in order to facilitate as many users as you can.

Know your product

If you need to achieve a certain effect then learn how to do it. It can make all the difference to your Flash design, if it is for a presentation or learning site use an appropriate design/style.

Do not hold your audience hostage

There is nothing worse than viewing a Flash site and not being able to skip the introduction animation. Make sure you have an obvious exit or skip icon in plain sight for any animations that are not essential.

Include a link to download a Flash plug-in

If the user cannot download the plug-in how do you expect them to view your site. Make sure you place your link to the free player at the beginning of your site.

Have an info. page ready to go if a visitor does not have Flash

If your user's browser does not have flash installed you need to tell them. Plus it is also always a good idea to have an alternative way of viewing your site to increase accessibility, sometimes this is not possible to do due to the extensive amount of Flash you maybe using to create your site.

Keep the size of your Flash projects down to an acceptable size

Keep that file size down, make sure you optimized your images properly and remove all none essential data. Also remember that specifications of the user is paramount, it is still the norm to design websites and alike to 800 by 600 desktop constraints (however this will change in the near future due to the increase in TFT sales)

Optimize for search engines

Flash presentations are self contained files, the contained elements are not exposed to bots from the search engines that spider your page. Be sure you use META information to convey the content the bots need to index your page. In addition to the META information, the text or body content used in your alternate HTML page described above can be used as an effective way to optimize for search engines.

Make it functional

Involve your user, let your visitor play an active part of the experience instead of passively looking at a Flash presentation.

It doesn't have to be all Flash

Do not think that Flash is everything, sure you can make the entire site with flash and in some cases it is relevant to do so. Try and use a combination of authoring such as HTML and use Flash to embellish your site be it in a functional way or merely cosmetic, try and find a balance.

Update your pages

If you have designed a site well then the chances are you will have a high degree of returning visitors, update your site periodically to give your audience something new to view.

Lastly

It only takes a few moments to annoy the user, hopefully if you try and stick to the points this will not happen and you will produce many varied, informative and entertaining Flash websites, good luck.