A flash intro to your site can be visually stimulating for the visitor.  Keep it simple. This is a generation of people demanding instant gratification.  When pages take too long to load, they will either skip the flash into or leave the website altogether.

Checking out other websites or Flash tutorials can give some ideas of what you can do with your own site.  In this post, you will see a step-by-step video Flash tutorial where you will learn how to create cool lightning effects using the pen tool and glow filter.  This is a good tutorial for those new or fairly new to Flash.  You will see how the designer draws the different lightning bolts with the pen tool starting and ending at the same two points throughout.

Beginners could get confused with the amount of steps required to make a seven frame Flash, but the folks at LearnFlash take you from step one to the finish explaining everything along the way.  So in just over nine minutes, you will create a new document, import an image to the library, place image in stage area, resize stage area to fit image size and align, create layers, convert to movie clip, edit movie clip, working with time lines, select key frames, add filters and adjusting image colors, alternating frames to enhance the saturation, drawing lightning bolts, apply glowing effect on bolt, then finally editing frames one last time for the finished results.

You can apply these fundamentals with many of your Flash projects in the future. It does not necessarily have to be lightning. For the full video tutorial, check out Entheos.