Intermediate DreamWeaver

From TechHelp

[edit] Adding Interactive Media to Your Pages

In DreamWeaver MX you have the ability to add Flash buttons and some other interactive media, without having to leave the DreamWeaver program. If you look at the tool bar at the top of your page you will notice that there are tabs along the top. One tab is called Media. If you click on this tab your icons on the toolbar will change. With the Media tab selected you should see a toolbar that looks like the following image.

From left to right the icons stand for;

• Flash Elements- These would be movies you have created in Flash
• Flash Button- This allows you to easily add a nice looking button to your page
• Flash Text- This allows you to easily add Flash text without leaving Dreamweaver
• Shockwave- This allows you to add Shockwave files that you would have created outside of DreamWeaver
• Applet- If you have some Java programming background you can choose to add Java Applets
• Param- This deals with more advanced web development and helps create parameters for media
• ActiveX- This is used to add Microsoft ActiveX controls to media, another advanced option
• Plugin- This is what you want to use when you would like to add a movie and make it play when the page opens

[edit] Adding Flash Buttons

If you want to jazz up your site using flash buttons DreamWeaver makes this easy. First place your cursor where you would like to add the button. Then click on the Flash Button icon in the toolbar. This will open a menu that looks like this.

First you will want to decide on the style of the button. In this example I picked StarSpinner. Next you will want to fill in the Button text that you want to appear. For this example I created a classroom policies button. You can change the size and kind of font here if you like. Then simply browse to the page that you would like to link the button to. You will want to make sure that you give the button a name that makes sense for later use. Then click Apply if you would like to see how it appears on your page before clicking OK. When you are sure it looks satisfactory to you click OK. You can always change the way the button looks in the future if you would like.

[edit] Adding Media

If you want to have movies or audio files on your web page the easiest way to do this is save them to a specific folder and then link to the file itself. This will allow the user to manipulate the page in a way they would like. Whether it is simply opening the file or downloading it.