For Swish, add sound to your scene, some sort of looped wave file for example. Then:

1. Create a new "text" object such as 'Sound off'.
2. Highlight this text in the treeview in the left pane.
3. Go to Action and choose Add an Event and click "On Press" for that object.
4. Then click Add Event and choose Stop Sound.

When you play your scene, it will play a sound until you click the text for sound off.

You could make another text object to restore the sound using the same method. This will only work in the scene it is placed in. In mine, for example, when you press Enter=> it changes scenes and the music starts again. ~ Brad

Q: Do I have to upload the SWI file in addition to the HTML file? ~ Mike

You will have to save your SWISH document as a .swf (export option). Or, if you have created an .html file with your document, just upload the .swf and the .html. The .swi is just for the SWISH program itself, so you can open it and make changes. ~ Brad

Q: This is very appealing technology, and very attractive, but may I ask what people are doing for search engine rankings when using sites designed this way? Are there alternative HTML sites being offered up, or is stealth technology being utilized? ~ Marcia

You can still work in META tags behind SWISH so spiders will find and index the site properly. A good site incorporates not only the flashy technology, but good and valuable content. However, the content included in Flash does not get indexed, so I usually use the Flash only for an intro or menu page to make navigation interactive and easy. After that, good old-fashioned content needs to run. ~ Russ

Check out internetday.com. This site has a wealth of information on traffic building, getting search engine ranking, how to choose keywords based on what search engines look for, and a lot more. I subscribe to their daily newsletter, which is always full of info. Each one deals with a specific topic. ~ Jack

Thanks - good site. Between that site and the forums at webmasterworld.com, there's a wealth of information available. That's where I learned about optimizing for themes (like for Google and Alta Vista). ~ Marcia

To maximize attractiveness to search engines, make your key pages, especially your home page, strictly an HTML page, with meta tags AND key words sprinkled throughout the text. On these pages, give visitors the option to go to your Flash page. Many webbies do it the other way around, Flash first with a link to plain HTML. Let the HTML page be the intro that keeps it simple for ALL visitors, whether they like Flash or not or can handle Flash or not (let's not forget the many dear folks using WebTV, which can't even handle much java, let alone Flash). The home page should not take any longer than 15 seconds to download on 28k modems, anyway. You'd be surprised how many people are still using slow connections to the internet! Too many to make me happy! But hey, my job is to make THEM happy, not me. ~ Terry

Q: What else is SWISH good for?

One thing that I use Swish for (well worth the purchase) is to make screensavers. You do need another software package to take the .swf file to a screensaver program that will work with flash movie files. ~ Brad

Q: How do you add sound to a Flash movie?

The sound is added in the time line, in that small row above where your text and pictures go. This is where all the events are handled. Click on that line at the frame you want the music (or sound) to start, and add an Action, in this case choose Play sound. Things get more complicated if you want the sound to loop, but it can be done with a little practice. As you have seen (maybe), you can also assign onclick events (like playing or stopping a sound clip) when a object is clicked on. ~ Brad

Q: How do you keep people from leaving the site while they're waiting for the movie to load?

The time lag, as with any Flash file, is the downloading of the file to your browser before it starts playing. I use a loader so that the "exit" link shows first while the rest of the file loads. This gives the user the option of skipping the intro and getting to the site itself. The preloader shows "loading" or "please wait a moment" or something like that. It loops using an event until the Flash player sees that the other stuff is loaded. This takes two scenes: one for the preloader and one for the actual content. Also, create a text link somewhere to bypass the intro if the visitor wishes. ~ Brad

There are couple of great preloader tutorials at designsbymark.com. Preloaders involve actionscripts, but if you follow these tutorials step by step, it's pretty easy to create. I would suggest that you start with the simple ones without a "percentage loaded counter" and then try the more advanced. ~ Jack
   

THE LINKS

swishzone.com

TUTORIALS

macromedia.com
designsbymark.com
flashplanet.com
flashcentral.com
hotwired.com
flashgeek.com
extremeflash.com
flashkit.com
flashskills.com
virtual-fx.net

Vector Graphics Tutorial:
jasc.com/tutorials/

Online Classes:
trainingtools.com

Webmastering Tips:
internetday.com
webmasterworld.com