Making Flash buttons

Flash is a line-drawing animation technology developed by Macromedia. It is a separate program that allows you to make vector quality animations which are smaller than animated GIF files. Although most people will use this separate program to produce animations for their website, Dreamweaver does include two options for creating Flash buttons and Flash text. Both of these are found under Insert, then Media.

This button or text feature allows you to add fonts not normally available to browsers, because it is making a special "graphic like" object.

You can see from the window choices which appear when you select Flash button some of the choices you have. If you are creating a button, be sure to fill in the option for the text for the button (which I have highlighted below). You also would want to include information for the link.

Because Flash buttons or Flash text are vector like objects, they can be resized in your browser (particularly they can be made larger) and the quality is not deteriorated. Once you have placed Flash buttons (or text), to see the "movie effect" you need to view the page in a browser.

This feature introduced in Dreamweaver 4 and continued in later releases is really producing compiled "movies", and creation of either a button or text produces a special object that requires the Flash plug-in installed on the user's computer. This plug-in is installed automatically with 4.0+ browsers, but it can be a version or two behind what the programmer creating the Flash application assumes. Furthermore, not all browsers on all platforms (for example, Internet Explorer on a Mac) will automatically play a Flash animation, even when the plug-in is properly installed. At least that is what I have been told.

Depending on your audience and your knowledge of what type of browsers they have, using Flash buttons or Flash text are options you can consider.

These tips are created as part of a class on Dreamweaver Basics.