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If you want to have a site that is principally Flash, you will still need to surround it with html. There are two main reasons:

  1. 1. You can't put metatags into Flash itself. So if you want your site referenced by search engines, you'll need an html entry page that includes metatags;
     
  2. Some browsers (especially on Macs) won't read .swf files if they are referenced directly.

So...

It's a good idea to use a tool like NOF for the html that needs to surround your Flash.

There's another little Flash foible...
You have to put the Flash into a frameset. This is because if you don't, and just make it full browser you get a right hand scroll bar, even though the Flash fills the screen. This is annoying. So all the major Flash sites do it by using a simple frameset which gets rid of the redundant scrollbar. If you look at sites like this one:

...you'll find they do it as I describe.

Your swf file
You'll have made your .swf file in Flash. Bring it in as New File Asset in Assets View. You don't insert it into a page with the tool in NOF designed to do so. If you do that, it won't scale to your browser. That tool is for inserting Flash effects into a NOF page. This technique is for creating a full-browser Flash site.

Now...
There are three html documents required for each full-browser Flash page:

The frameset
Here's the frameset. This can be a NOF page with the code below being external html that replaces everything on your NOF page including the head:

<html>
<head>
<title>Yoursite</title>
</head>
<frameset rows="100%,*" framespacing="0" frameborder="no" border="0"> 

<frame SRC="flashframe.html" NAME="main" frameborder="0" border="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no">

<frame SRC="hidden.html" NAME="hidden" frameborder="0" border="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no">

</frameset>
</html>

To bring it into your site, copy the code above to Notepad. Save it as whatever.html (use your own preferred name) and then bring this in as external html to a zero margins page and make the external html fill the page.

When you bring this in as external html, you'll get a warning that it has no body, but don't worry about it.

Of course, now you need to include in your site the code for the html for each of the frames specified above. The code for these two frames (following) can simply be included as assets (in Assets View) and marked to Always Publish.

The main frame
Let Flash generate the html page using the Publish feature of Flash. This ensures the object class id, codebase URL, and tags are correct. Here's an example of the code generated by Flash. Save it to your Assets folder as flashframe.html, then, in Publish view, include it in your site as a New File Asset:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html;  charset=ISO-8859-1">
<TITLE>Yoursite</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<!-- URL's used in the movie-->
<!-- text used in the movie-->
<OBJECT classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
 codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#ve rsion=6,0,0,0"
 WIDTH="100%" HEIGHT="100%" id="Yoursite" ALIGN="">
 <PARAM NAME=movie VALUE="Yoursite.swf"> <PARAM NAME=quality VALUE=high> <PARAM NAME=bgcolor VALUE=#FFFFFF> <EMBED src="Yoursite.swf" quality=high bgcolor=#FFFFFF  WIDTH="100%" HEIGHT="100%" NAME="temp" ALIGN=""
 TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></EMBED>
</OBJECT>
</BODY>
</HTML>

The hidden frame
Here's the code for the hidden frame ("hidden.html"). Save it, via Notepad, to your Assets folder, then add it to your site as a New File Asset in Publish View:

<html>
<head>
<title>Hidden</title>
<base target="main">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#303038">
</body>
</html>

Notes
1. Change the colour throughout to match the background colour of your Flash movie. Mine (#303038) was to match on this site:

...where I've used the code I've described on this page.

2. Change "Yoursite" and "your" - wherever they occur - to your own naming system.

3. Make sure the two frame html files specified above are in the same Publish directory as the frameset document. If they aren't, drag them there in Publish View.

That's it. Good luck!

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