I am wanting to create a new web site and decided I would go with flash over the old html FrontPage I've been using for the past year and a half. Problem is, I have never used flash before. Which Macromedia program would I use to create a flash web site? Is it hard to learn? Can I upload my flash web site straight out of the macromedia application like I do with frontpage? ( <= thats probably a big time newbie question). I read on the board somewhere that powweb.com was probably the best host. Would they support uploading from this Flash application? Thanks.

Macromedia Flash Mx creates Flash animations and interactive graphics which can be embedded in HTML to create a Flash web site. Flash MX costs about $500.

I also like SwishMax. Swish is a program for writing Flash files which is significantly cheaper and easier to learn (at least I think so) than Macromedia Flash. Swish Max costs around $100. They also have a version Swish 2 which lacks some of the scripting capabilities of SwishMax for about $50.

Flash is both the name of the Macromedia product and the file format for the web with the extension .swf. Several software pacakges will write .swf files. The .swf files are embedded in HTML. Programs like Dreamweaver will do it automatically for you, but it is easy to do by hand as well.

You can create entire web sites with Flash or you can use Flash for portions of the site. There are things to be said for both approaches, though the latter seems more popular.

Here is a virtual tour I did in Swish and output in Flash.
http://www.meridianmultimedia.com/tremblant2/tremblant.html

Rick

the squeeze codec to get the video into flash does not allow for effective compression out of the box. I'd recommend using acrobat or director and dropping quicktime or mpg files in... (dangling preposition)