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If you do anything like they did you will end up with a half-meg Flash
file just like they did. It's far too big unless you don't care about
dialup visitors leaving your site because of it. These enormous flash
files showing up everywhere are giving Flash a very bad reputation and
many people are uninstalling flash player as a result. You need to
have a maximum size in mind when you make your Flash file. If you
make a business website with a starting page that is over 100k bytes
then you are making a mistake! (except in the just-for-fun site
classification)

Another way is to have the page load without the large file and
provide a link to it so that at least your intro page loads right
away.
tralfaz

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Text effects are not a strong point for Flash. You can certainly do
them but there are other softwares such as Swish Max that has a lot of
canned text effects where you don't have to work so hard at it. In
the past, when I needed a good text effect, I did it in Swish and then
imported the Swish swf file into Flash afterwards. If you want to
save yourself a lot of frustration, download Swish Max trial and try
out some of the built-in text effects to see if they work for your
project.
good luck,
tralfaz

I am new to Flash but am familiar with Dreamweaver and Photoshop. I'm trying to
create a flash file with my company logo that is dramatic and stands out,
without a lot of load time. I found one on this site: www.smith-wesson.com, and
that is almost what I'm looking for. If anyone knows of a good tutorial, I'd
appreciate it.

go to flashkit.com tutorials, or just do a search for flash tutorials. There
are all kinds of great text effects and animations that can be found on the
internet. Some of the tutorials I have found on there are wrong, but they at
least lend me some idea on how to get it done. It is really all about
structure.

I do intend to link to it, as I don't want to scare off potential customers
with enormous wait times and, I don't need mine to be as involved. I'm looking
at making one basic image with text that, for lack of a better word, "zooms" in
with a shadow or gradient remnant of the letter that follows it, and then fades
out.
I'm having a hard time finding a tutorial for that and it's becomming
frustrating. =(