The Flash Paradigm

In order to design a Flash website one must understand how it differs from an HTML based site. The difference between them is like the difference between a Delorean (a car), and Marty McFly's Delorean (the time-travelling car from Back to the Future).

More specifically, a car can only travel places while time constantly marches by. Marty's car, on the other hand, can travel to destinations and past, present, or future time-periods. Flash is built around a timeline paradigm for animation, and because of this we can create buttons that not only go places but go to other times on the timeline. Not only is Flash comparable to the nuclear-powered delorean, it has an extra feature that Marty could've only dreamed of, the ability to freeze time as well.

We will see all of this functionality a bit later on but for now just keep in mind these differences between the two paradigms of website creation.