Lesson10.Loading and Optimizing Flash Content

Lesson 10. Loading and Optimizing Flash Content

It's time to start putting things together. So far, throughout this book, you have been creating a FLA file that will ultimately house the content of the Tech Bookstore website. The content for the website has been broken down into smaller little pieces that will load into the interface only when someone clicks a button. This is the most sensible approach to building any kind of Macromedia Flash application because it keeps the initial SWF file to download as small as possible.

Loading content into the Tech Bookstore

There are other advantages to breaking the website content into smaller pieces. They are a little more subtle, but no less important: End users aren't forced to wait for content that they aren't interested in to download, and more than one person developing the project can work on it. If you did everything in one Flash file, you'd have a very long download time, and you'd be the only person able to work on the project.

In this lesson, you will complete the functional aspect of the website, saving publishing for Lesson 11. You'll start to gather the smaller SWF files you produced, and learn how to make your Flash application as efficient as you can make it. When you're finished, you'll test and debug the application to make sure that everything is working correctly before you publish it and post it to the web (or your local web server, in this case). You wouldn't put a half-eaten banana up for sale; likewise, putting a half-working Flash application on the web is very, very naughty. Shame on you for even thinking about it.