This is a simple and straightforward question, but the answer is really anything but simply because there are a ton of different ways you can approach building a site. I'll try and break down your options as best I can, and what direction you want to take your site in is completely up to you.Originally Posted by ChaoOfNee
There are multiple ways to create a preloaders, and how, where, and when you use them depend on how you are building your Flash file. If all the content for the site is predetermined (i.e. not dynamically driven by database/XML), and is all brought into the library by hand, you would only need a single preloader, for the beginning of the movie. On the other hand, if you are loading images and content from a server (SWF's, images, videos, etc..), you would need a reusable preloader instance that is called whenever you want to load content.
There are positives and negatives to each option. Having all the content included in the file is much easier and requires less programming, there is zero loading time when accessing content on the site, but the initial load time for the Flash movie will be far greater than if the content was loaded up externally. Having content loaded up from an external location requires a lot more programming and planning, but ends up being a far more flexible solution if you want to go and change any content. Being that you do not need to actually go inside the Flash file to change something, you can just change the piece of content that is being pulled. Also, load times initially will be far shorter, but will have small loading periods for pulling the content from the server.
Since you're not all that well versed in Actionscript, my recommendation is to stick with animated transitions. Put frame labels on your frames and when you click a button tell the timeline to gotoAndPlay("yourframelabel"). Otherwise you will end up getting into some procedural event based Actionscript, and while not complicated to do, it takes far more planning because of the coding required. If you're interested in doing code based transitions I recommend you check out TweenMax.
Lastly, your galleries. First you need to decide how you want your gallery to work, this comes down to the loading external resources vs including all of the content inside of the Flash movie. If you are loading it up externally, like I mentioned before, becomes a far more complicated process. Requires a ton more planning, but in the end is the most flexible solution. You would end up using a combination of XML and Actionscript (and powered by a database + server side scripting if you really want to make it as flexible as possible, but not required). If you're not loading it up from an external resource, you just need to give your content in the library instance names, call them by their instance names and say addChild("instancename"), and that will add them to the screen.
I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of little details, but I figure this should be enough to get your brain moving about how you're going to go about this. Anymore questions you have I'll try and do my best to answer them without getting as wordy as I did here.
edit: After rereading your post, and my long winded response, I may not have helped you at all. Hopefully I did at least a little bit.
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