Are There Any Special Techniques or Ways To Build Flash Banners?

For the last year or so I've had lots of people ask me about doing Flash Banners, and though I've built a variety of stuff from scratch with Flash, like screenshows, animation sequences, puzzles, and training apps, I've yet to do a banner. So I wanted to ask what special techniques, if any, you might need to know.

I'm sure there's an art to doing good ones, and I'd be interested in tips, best practices, examples, links, etc. on that, but what I'm mainly asking is if there are any special techiques for doing them or setting them up.

It seems obvious you'd have to set the movie size to whatever dimensions that're specified, but how hard can that be? Am I missing something? :confused:

http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorials/Flash/1

...is fun.


Flash is sorta chunky, non-accesable stuff, but pretty in a pintch i guess.
I'd say DEFINETLY stay away from having any kind of navigation in it.

One fun thing i did when i made a couple was make it so theres one main flash that has look/style/effect(i.e. one i did has scan lines)... and then load another movie (flash) dynamically within it (pull the info from a txt file or something)... that way you can do fun stuff like whip up a special christmas thing and load that movie inside the banner on holidays or whatever... in stead of creating a WHOLE NEW banenr ya just make the christmas puke...

not so obvious but an example @ redtv.org
(eventualy) it loads that picture i took of the city in the box, but i can change that to anythign.

just make sure the flahses you will be using will not drive readers away by the long time it takes getting into the page.

some people do nto have the time in the world to watch flashes unfold, you know.

you could try visiting some boards with a flash community:)