Flash and HTML working together... How?

[seeddesign]

I've always designed either little Flash commercials inside HTML pages, pure Flash sites or pure HTML sites. Now I'm wanting to explore how to make a flash menu that controls the content of the site. How do I do such a thing?

Can anyone point me to a tutorial?

Thanks.

Jason

[mykrob]

havent done it, but my guess would be a page with frames. Have your flash menu in one frame, and when you use getURL make sure to make the target of the getURL the same as the name of your content frame.

-myk

[Ask The Geezer]

Great, a flash menu in a frames page. The search engine spiders are going to caccoon your site and hang it under the floor.

[oldnewbie]

http://www.kirupa.com/developer/flash5/frames.asp

[seeddesign]

What do you mean about the search engines... what's the bad side of this idea?

Jason

[oldnewbie]

Search engines are supposed to have problems with sites that use framesets!

http://www.google.ca/search?q=search...e+Google&meta=

[jasonsplace]

If I were you, I would avoid frames at all costs. Mainly because they suck. The easiest thing to do instead of frames is to create an html table with the same layout that your frames would have been if you would have used them. That is what was done at http://www.ericdsnider.com and it looks great.

[Ask The Geezer]

>>What do you mean about the search engines... what's the bad side of this idea?

As oldnewbie said, spiders have trouble reading frames, but, they don't even see a swf. They can not follow links from a swf menu. Put that togeather with the frames problem, and it's a real loser as far as getting any ranking with the search engines.

Either make the site with a main html page and flash movies embedded on the page, or make a wholly flash site and piggyback it on an html site, as in giving the user a choice of viewing the site in flash or html from the index.html page. The spiders will follow all the links from the index page and list all the html pages. As the flash side of the site has links back to it from an html page, it rides along for free.

I have seen a really progressive html page site, where they used an interface done in PhotoShop, and seamlessly added flash movies for the special effects. I was impressed, but I can't find the bookmark. This would be the best way to go.

I mean as far as getting a chance at ranking in the search engines.