making a web page for my business

[five.five-six]

i don't even know where to start. what is flash?

[balzak]

Flash is interactive/animated content. For example, Youtube videos are flash. When you see a site with a template that has animated buttons, moving objects, sounds, etc., then it is likely flash.

Others will disagree, but I suggest staying away from it. That's just my opinion. Even well-done flash websites, to me, look rather hokey. They are often slower to load and eat up more bandwidth. Then there are all kinds of problems when it comes to accessing your site via mobile devices. Mobile device functionality used to not matter much, but now a rather significant and growing segment of web users are using mobile devises on a regular basis.

Often times hiring a good web designer is the easiest route. But, I've seen that most of them are full of BS. I used to make web sites as a main source of income. I saw many of my "peers" were ripping their customers off pretty bad. Things like charging them $500-1500 for websites they made with templates.

If you tell us more about the site you want to create we can probably help you get it done as cheap and good as possible. Is it a simple informational site for your business? E-commerce? Any special functionality you are looking for?

[sfwdiy]

Flash is garbage. It takes forever to load, runs piss-poorly on mobile devices, is an absolute resource hog and is a huge pain in the *** to change or maintain. Screw flash, just go with a clean CSS design.

I can recommend a personal friend who does good work if you're interested. He did my old website: http://mac-magicians.com

--B

[high_revs]

yeah.. beginning... start basic... maybe not even expanding menus unless you want to have a shopping cart of something. flash can be a good and bad thing. overly done, hella slow. hella annoying. did i say hella slow???

if you care about looks a lot (which does kinda matter to keep the attention span of someone), you may have to hire someone but shop around. you can do a DIY but it does require a little technical learning. but yeah, watch out for quotes as some folks jsut churn basic pages out and you think it's a lot of work. most of it can be cut-n-paste from text "you" provide.

look at different websites. get a feel for how you want your website to look like. colors, typography (font), types of pictures. of course, the more basic, less complex, the cheaper the work could be unless the person creating the site for you has templates for you to choose from in look and feel.

here's an example of a flash website - http://www.2advanced.com/