Designing a Website from Head to Toe with Free Flash Templates

In this tutorial we'll go over some basic steps in designing and planning your new Flash website using the Adobe Illustrator. Once you're done with the blueprints stage you can translate this design in to different coding languages or use Flash, as you wish, but it will give you a good idea on how to start the design of your new Flash website.

1. Create a Sitemap and Gather Your Content
You've chosen one of Massive's free Flash templates and now you're needed to implement those little changes that will make it both personal and unique. Make sure to keep things relatively simple, a website shouldn't be a tedious experience. Before you start designing all the artsy elements and plunging into artistic creativity, make sure you have the backbone of your websites ready.

List all your content and the features you want your website to include. Leave some room for flexibility because you may not know everything from the get go, but even so, you'll definitely be able to list the most important elements of your site. For example, if you're building a business website you may want to include the following elements:
-   Services
-   About the company
-   Prices
-   Contact information
If you're building a musician website however, this might be your list:
-   Music
-   About the Band
-   Pictures (galleries)
-   Videos
-   Contact
-   Order Online
-   Schedule (gigs)

And so on and so forth. Now that you've listed all the information you want to include, start planning the sitemap. Where will your visitors start? What will the second and third page they visit be? Create a treelike sketch to plan your website's route.

2. Choosing from the Free Flash Templates

Don’t plan your content by the design, use the content to determine the design, to make it flexible enough to accommodate everything you want to include be it pictures, videos, text, widgets, animations etc. You have lots of different options of various layouts in the different free Flash templates so you should choose the one that will make it easiest for you to upload all your content without overloading on the design. Now that you know what that content is you can start making decisions on the type of grid you want.

The illustration above is of a few basic layouts that you will find in the free Flash templates galleries. Each layout emphasizes different elements, and of course there are layouts with much greater sophistication. The template you choose will affect the amount and the type of content you will have on your site and will also affect the manner in which that content is revealed to users. Try to be as popular as possible. There are many different types of users on the internet, and you want as many people as possible enjoying your site, so make sure that even the inexperienced and non tech savvy can enjoy your site.

3. Create a Mockup

This is where the real design starts. Once you've decided the very basic layout of your website and what is going to be included on it you can start taking the design process a few steps forward? Start playing around with your design elements on separate design software. If you're more comfortable with hard copy design tools you can even use different shapes and colors to mark out the different areas and start getting a feel for the balance between the different areas.

Mockups are easier to work with than the actual website so get your design planning done using the mockups, it'll save you a lot of time and effort correcting your mistakes later on. For you lazy designers, please remember that it always takes much longer to correct a mistake than to spend that extra hour planning this out carefully. The mockup should show where your menus are on each of the pages. It should be clear how a user will get from one page to another. Also, the content should be marked, and in addition, I recommend marking up the different types of content. For example, differentiate between texts and images, and even between images and videos. If there is something special on a specific page, make note of it. Now that you've got that out of the way, I'm sure new ideas will start flowing and you will be able to easily switch things around to accommodate your new plans and design.

Good Luck.