/Flash/ Animated sub navigation
02/10/2008 | Filed under Develop > Flash
Paul Wyatt explains how to create slick, user-friendly navigation bars for your Flash websites and integrate them into an HTML page with Dreamweaver CS3
It doesn’t matter what kind of content your website provides, if people can’t navigate it easily, they’ll soon go elsewhere. Some sites score highly, with expertly designed, user-friendly navigation bars that function slickly while seamlessly enhancing the look and feel. Others are just downright annoying, expecting you to know that those unlabelled 3D cubes in the bottom corner are actually the navigation bar.
Most navigation that extends to a sub navigation relies on the same function: clicking a button that prompts an animation to play and load the sub nav bar and content. On clicking another navigation option, this animation then ‘rewinds’. This technique is easy to learn and uses a conditional statement in Flash. We’ll cover how to do that in this tutorial. It’s a technique you can develop to produce your own inspired, creative and, above all, usable navigation bars. We’ll also dip our toes into Dreamweaver, looking at the accessibility options it offers in Flash.
About the author:
Name: Paul Wyatt
Site: www.paulwyatt.co.uk
Areas of expertise: Interactive web design, motion graphics and video
Clients: The X Factor, Fanta, Smirnoff and Research Studios
Which advert annoys you most? Any Halifax one!
Click here to download the support files
Click here to download tutorial PDF
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Comments
Pete / 03/10/2008 / 14:04
Who in their right mind creates any form of navigation using Flash to place into an HTML page?
Moreover, who thinks this is a good idea?
You've just made a maintenance headache and most likely reduced the accessiblity of your site.
At the very least generate the nav elements on the fly from an XML file or something.
I did like the 2 sidebars in the article which oddly seem to be about promoting Dreamweaver rather than Flash yet both manage to say Dreamweaver is OK but we'd prefer to use something else.
Simon Cainton / 10/10/2008 / 20:30
What's wrong with having a navigation in Flash? How else is it going to be viewed on the web if it's not in an html page. I think he's just showing how if and else statements work.
I hate dreamweaver. Good to hear it seems to be improving though.
Andrew / 31/10/2008 / 16:28
Flash isn't very accessible for navigation. Also some browsers have issues with flash layered over html. It has to do with how transparency is handled by the browser.
