creative, design, web design, flash design, flash web design, flash tutorials, web design tutorial, graphic design Testing your design Test, test, and then test again. That should be the motto of every Flash designer. There’s nothing more frustrating than being nearly finished, just to find a glaring error in your logic, or, for that matter, in the ActionScript, that prevents the site from doing all you wanted. It’s in your best interest to test early and test often. You can do some testing in authoring mode, and do a full-fledged test in another window. Getting the bugs out If your Web site contains ActionScript, variables, and dynamic text, you have a recipe for disaster if you don’t know how to debug your site. Murphy’s Law can and will raise its ugly head. But you can nip Murphy in the bud by using Flash’s powerful debugger. You can track every variable in your Flash movie as well as in your ActionScript. However, even at the default frame rate, a snippet of ActionScript code executes in 1⁄12 of a second. In other words, things happen so fast that you can’t track them without a little help from a friend. Those friends are known as breakpoints (not to be confused with the formerly popular break dance), which you place on complicated lines of ActionScript. A breakpoint stops ActionScript cold in its tracks when you debug your movie. After getting the skinny on what your code is doing, you resume the movie from within the Debugger. Optimizing the beast After you get the bugs out, you have some housecleaning to do. You need to optimize your Flash movie in order for it to load as quickly as possible. One of the first things you do is clean out the Library. Publishing a Flash movie with unused symbols in the Library is like preparing a car for the Indy 500 and leaving a whole bunch of extra parts in the engine compartment; the extra baggage makes the Web page load slower. Other issues you’ll deal with while optimizing the site are the quality of the images and the data rate of any sounds in your movie. Optimizing your Flash movie means it will load faster, which is a good thing for your site’s viewers. Publishing and uploading your brainchild After creating your Flash site, it’s time to share it with the world, or at least with a few close friends. To convert your Flash document into a Flash movie, you publish it. When you publish the movie, you create an SWF file and an HTML file into which your movie is embedded. Or if you create a large Flash site, you publish several SWF files that load into your interface, which is yet another SWF file. The interface SWF file is embedded in an HTML document, which you also publish. When you publish a Flash movie, you have several decisions to make that determine who can view your Flash movie. After you publish your Flash Web site, you upload it to your server. But not to worry, publishing and uploading a Flash movie isn’t rocket science.