Chapter 20: Designing Navigational Elements

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This chapter provides descriptions of several of the Web-page navigation solutions that Macromedia Fireworks MX offers: the extremely popular pop-up menus (which are easier to use than ever), navigation bars, and disjoint rollovers.

Understanding Navigation Solutions

Enabling users to navigate your Web site easily is of utmost importance when designing a site. Users get frustrated when they arrive at a page and can't figure out how to get to where they want to go. Fireworks MX offers many navigational solutions — you simply choose the best method for your Web site.

Simple rollovers — buttons with up and over states (described in more detail later) — are the most widely used type of JavaScript buttons on the Internet. Fireworks gives you several methods to create rollovers, using frames or symbols.

A disjoint rollover, sometimes called a remote rollover or a multiple-event rollover, is much like a simple rollover but is designed to trigger an image swap in a location other than the button itself. Each button can change this area to provide additional information to the user.

A navigation bar is a cohesive group of buttons with three or more "states" that are tracked. The tracked states of the buttons help the users understand where they are in the site. Navigation bars are especially useful in frames-based sites, where a single navigation page can be used in one frame to change the content in another frame.

A more sophisticated navigation system uses pop-up menus. Pop-Up menus, which are all the rage these days, can be made quite easily with the Fireworks MX Pop-Up Menu Wizard. However, pop-up menus involve a few technical considerations. The pop-up menu tutorial in this chapter digs into the issues and offers solutions.



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Macromedia Studio MX Bible
Macromedia Studio MX Bible
ISBN: 0764525239
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 491

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