Dreamweaver MX: The Missing Manual

Flash Buttons

While adding graphic rollovers to a Web page is a breeze, DreamweaverMX’s Flash button feature is even easier. Without any additional image-editing or animation software, you can bring your pages to life with interactive buttons that include animation and sound.

Flash buttons are predesigned buttons, to which you can add your own labels and links. They can do much more than just change from a “before” look to an “after” look. For example, they may have three different looks (a third being a “pushed down” look that shows up when the button is clicked). They may also play a sound or trigger a little animation.

EXTENSION ALERTInstaGraphics Extensions for Dreamweaver

Ever get tired of the limited number of fonts you can use on your Web pages? How about the appearance of those boring bullets in unordered lists? No problem. Dreamweaver lets you add new commands—called extensions—to the program. This great feature makes it possible to add literally hundreds of additional features.

Many are available for free from a Macromedia’s Web site in a section called The Exchange—http://www.macromedia.com/exchange/.

Go there and search for InstaGraphics, a nifty extension that can convert headings and other text in a page to a GIF file using any font you installed on your computer. In addition, this extension can replace HTML bullets with a nicer looking graphic. (Fireworks is required to make this feature work.)

For more on using the Macromedia Exchange, see Appendix A.

You can download ...