Let us switch back over to Dreamweaver and I am going to do one more thing with an extension that we downloaded. Let me close out of my FTP setting now, disconnect from the server. And let me just clean up the screen here a little bit. I do not need all this in the back so I am going to command option H on my Mac to get everything cleaned up in the background. Now, if you recall, I installed two different extensions at the beginning of this lesson.
The second one was some new flash buttons. And if you are not familiar with flash buttons I will give you a refresher on that as I show you where the new ones are. Let us just scroll down to the bottom of this page and let us assume that instead of having this text links at the bottom that I have created, I might want something a little more interesting. So, let me just going to put a return here to show you how it would look and add the buttons underneath it.
Flash buttons like many of the other flash options are under the insert menu under media. Now, if you are just inserting a regular flash file, you want this first option, but this little collection of options here in the middle are flash capabilities built into Dreamweaver. So, when I select flash button, what I am actually getting is a collection of buttons that are done as individual flash files that I can embed into my Dreamweaver page just like I had embed a flash file I created in flash myself. It is just kind of a shortcut way to create buttons.
Now, when I added that extension, I added some new buttons here. So, if you do not see this, it is probably because you have not installed the extension that I just installed. All of these options here at the top came with that new buttons option. So, when I got that extension, all of this little, like the shopping card icon came along with it. So, let me just pick one like this blue oval and insert that under the page to show you how this would work.
You select the button you want and then in this dialogue pretty into it. You are going to change the text that appears on that button. So, if I wanted to replace the home link with a button, I would just type “home” here. You can choose whatever font you might prefer. And you can set the size. If you want it to link, just use the browse button and since I am linking to the home button, I want to go back up to my index page.
So now, I have set the button style, the text, the font, the link. I can choose to target it. Now, they are quick refresher. If you choose target_blink when you click on a link, your browser will launch a new browser window to open that page and keep the existing page open. That is probably the most common one you want to use. Paring it often on top or more important if you are using frames. You can change the background color of your button and you can name your button.
Now, notice here at the bottom, when you insert this button on your page, you are actually creating an SWF file which is the extension for a flash file. So, I am going to call this home button so that I remember what it is. Now, when I click okay, it takes a second because Dreamweaver is actually creating that button as a flash file on the fly.
Now, if I wanted to do another one, I would just put my cursor here, choose insert media flash button and I am going to make one little refinement here. I have got my simple oval blue, let us call this BELIZE and I believe I chose Verdana 11, make this one to BELIZE, this would be the pages in here. I want my main BELIZE page which I just called BELIZE. Leave the target where it is.
This time, I am going to change the background color to black and see if that will look a little better on this page. BELIZE button, okay. Now, that looks much smoother. And if I want to edit the existing one, I can just double click; bring it back up, change the background color to black, okay.
So, if you prefer to have buttons, there are countless flash buttons in the world today. In fact one of the most common extensions you will find up on the macromedia, exchange server are flash buttons and more flash buttons and
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