How to Create a Flash Website. A Tutorial for Beginners from MotoCMS

Would you like to have a beautiful Flash website without having to pay much for its building and maintaining? MotoCMS can offer you a good solution of how to make a Flash website with minimum efforts and money spent. You can like or dislike this system, but before taking the decision it would be rather good to read this guide for getting more information about Moto Flash CMS and MotoCMS templates.

If you know how your future website will look like then you can start creating it. But if you are not sure about some design or functional elements then it will be good enough to spend some time browsing through relevant Flash websites. There are many inspirational collections and showcases that can help you define the final look of your own Flash project. Now it’s time to think about the domain name. It is the address of a website and all web specialists declare in one voice that it must be well thought out.

After you’ve registered your domain name, you need to select a company to host your site (there are tons and tons of hosting providers, and choosing one is pretty much a subject for a whole new research). So these are the traditional preparations before creating websites. But MotoCMS offers you an opportunity to start building your website even without all these things.

You’ll be able to choose a domain name and hosting after trying out and working with a Flash website template of MotoCMS in action. We allow you to try your own exclusive free online Demo version for 30 days. And here is a tutorial on how to create a MotoCMS-based Flash website by yourself.

Create Flash Website

The essential step-by-step guide of making a Flash website

1. Visit our Flash templates store and choose a design you like. As an example we’ll be working with the Template #34012.

2. Register a free demo version of the template with no payment and commitment required.

3. In a minute you’ll get an access details to your email. Using the URL, login and password from that message you’ll be able to access your demo any time and from any computer.

And after loading the template you’ll get to the main page with the control panel around.

On the top of the page you can see a toolbar which enables to manage all the templates’ elements. There also is the ‘Undo’/’Redo’ option for the more convenient and quick editing. On the right you’ll find a panel which allows you to set up elements’ parameters. And using the left toolbar you’ll be able to supplement pages with additional elements (slots, modules, texts, images, videos, etc).

4. You can easily modify every flash template’ element (as well as all website’s content) with a one- or double-click of the mouse or using the “Edit Module” button on the bottom right corner of the browser window.

Thereby in a few minutes you can change a background, titles, color and typefaces of texts. For example, we’ll edit the Company name by means of the Company name slot.

The Company name slot allows you to define a click behaviour when you press the sign. You can quite easily give an action to it: go to page, open pop-up, open URL, open file, mail to and full-screen options are available.

5. The other thing we’ll do is we’ll delete the image gallery from the home page and arrange it in a different way.

Find the Shape tab on the left panel and choose one of the offered shapes. In this example we drew 3 circles of different colors and sizes and placed them inside each other. Thanks to the mask being used while templates’ creation, we can display only bottom semicircles on the home page. Moreover it is possible to choose the placement of the logo: on the home page only or on the entire website.

6. The next step we’d like to demonstrate you is the Rich Content Block embedding.

Press the Add New Module button on the left panel and from the drop-down list choose the Rich Content Block. Select the place where you want the module to be located. Now you can type any necessary texts, customize fonts, styles, modes, effects, add images etc.

7. At the bottom of the page there is much free space. So why not to place a gallery previews there? To do this, find the Custom Photo Gallery Thumbnail List in the modules checklist. After choosing the location of the module you can easily adjust it. The right panel helps to edit the vertical or horizontal orientation of the thumbnails, a number and order of displayed photos, their border width and color, left and right arrow buttons, etc.

8. And one more thing we’d like to show you in action is Google Maps widget. Before implementing Google Maps into the Contacts page you should register your website for getting Google Maps API. Paste the API key into the current field of the content section of the Google Maps Widget.

Now you are able to add New Markers (it is possible to add unlimited number of them) and supplement them with Title and Description. These notes will become visible after clicking on the marker.

Within the Google Maps Widget it is possible to specify Default map type (normal satellite, hybrid, physical), Position of map focus (first point, last point, all points), Zoom parameters, Background (background fill alpha and background fill color), Control position (location, zoom, scale, map overview and map type) and Blend mode parameters.

Embedding Google Maps module into the template took a few minutes only. There’s no big deal. The control panel powered by MotoCMS will give you all necessary prompts at the every stage of your customization.

9. Don’t forget to save changes and compress data before logging out of your control panel. It will secure your XML files from errors while saving the template’s modifications.

It was the final step of the template’s editing and we are ready to offer you to evaluate the final results:

That’s all. Our Flash photo gallery is ready. We hope that you like our control panel and soon you will try to work something out by yourself.

MotoCMS wishes you the best of luck in your initiatives!