One of the most important parts of your advertising arsenal is your Web site. Your Web site is the place where you display your product to potential customers. Your product is design and interactive media, and it is important that these potential customers can view a wide range of projects. Often interactive designers will post what they feel is their best work to their Web site. While this is a good idea, I have learned that it is better to have a wide range of styles and types of projects posted online.

Pretty Loaded is an amazing gallery of Flash preloaders. This is a great place to get ideas for your own preloaders. But that being said really you shouldn’t see these bad boys that much these days if you are building your Flash right. Loading things in parts is the way, the truth and the light. But to play devils advocate loaders are a great way of building some excitement into a Flash piece and a great way to brand a project.

SWFAddress is a small, but powerful library that provides deep linking for Flash and Ajax. It’s a developer tool, (although a dude with a visual arts degree like me can figure it out!)? allowing creation of unique virtual URLs that can point to a website section or an application state. SWFAddress enables a number of important capabilities which are missing in today’s rich web technologies including:

> Bookmarking in a browser or social website
> Sending links via email or instant messenger
> Finding specific content with the major search engines
> Utilizing browser history and reload buttons

It has been my experience that designers freelance for one of two reasons: for fun or out of fear. You need to decide what “f” word is motivating you. It was the fear factor that drove me into freelance. I was employed at a small interactive firm that laid me off due to an economic down turn. I tried to find a full-time position that paid as well as my last one, but there where no job opportunities in my area.   For fear of loosing my house, my car and the shirt of my back, I had to find paying freelance clients and fast.

If you haven’t gone out and got your self Flash CS4 then this is one big reason to do it. This is something that will make creating characters in Flash way easier. Adobe has posted a great tutorial on how to use this. See: Using Inverse Kinematics“

Lee Brimelow has some really great, and well documented tutorials over at gotoandlearn, but be warned many of them are for “actionscript” junkies, but a few are good for mere mortals (aka timeline folk)

Lee Brimelow a Platform Evangelist over at Adobe has posted a rather nice (and might I say) easy to follow tutorial on how to create a parallax photo effect. For those of you who don’t know what “parallax photo effect” is, think Biography channel when they don’t have video for say a American civil war documentary. So instead they cut out photos of objects in the foreground and make them move faster than the background. The cool thing about Flash CS4 is it brings things that could only be done in AfterEffects to Flash. Simply by moving around 3D space metrics users can simulate this effect. I can’t wait to try this in a project. I also think adding some more animation to the background while you do this effect could also introduce some very interesting results as well.

I recently started using a gem of software called “Skitch”. Basically what it does is enables you to take a screen capture of anything on your screen.   While this by it’s self is not revolutionary, what makes Skitch so amazing is how easy it is to get a screen capture of something from the screen into your website or blog. In fact this blog post is the first use of this tool with WordPress. Basically this is how easy this software is to use:

There are many resources online for sharing and buying quality code to help fast track your Flash development projects. Many of these resources offer either free or a small fee to access the source .FLA files or components. I’ve tried to rank each of these resources with strengths and weakness so you can easily wade through the junk.

I have done a lot of looking around for a low-cost (or free open source Flash CMS) sadly, there is nothing like WordPress for managing content in Flash. Most Flash CMS systems are either hard to use or not well documented (or very expensive). This is not the case for FlashLoaded’s “Flash CMS“. Like all of FlashLoaded components you can expect high quality well documented tools to speed up your Flash development.