Designing a whole site in flash

1

Hi, I’m pretty new to flash and so far have only used it to make isolated movies. I’m trying to build a whole site with it now but don’t have a clue the best way to do this - I have a static menu at the left, but how do I get the main text to change every time a different menu button is clicked? (ie how do you make the existing text disappear and be replaced with the new info?) An example of what I mean is at http://www.personal-screening.com/flash/player.htm. Basically I need certain elements, like the menu, to stay there all the time, and just change the main item.

Any help at all with this would be great. I don’t want to have to resort to frames in frontpage again!:frowning:

2

change the variable name of the textbox you want to change to for example “info”.
Now add the action to all the buttons in the menu and add the text you want the textbox to display to where “blabla” is. (delete “blabla” of course-´leave the quotation marks as they are (don’t delete them))
and change _root.menu.textbox to whatever and wherever the textbox is.

on(release) {
_root.menu.info.textbox = "blabla"
}

I hope I helped :crazy: (don’t we all)

3

Lets assume you have 5 menu items in your menu.

Create a new flash movie with 3 layers,

Actions, Menu and Content

On the actions layer bring up it’s frame actions and insert a Stop action, otherwise your movie will play until the end.

On the menu layer copy your menu txt/graphics.

Now open the scene inspector and duplicate this scene 4 more times.Name the scenes in the order you would like them to appear(ie) scene1, scene2 etc.

Now you have your 5 different"pages" (scenes)for your menu to jump to.

On the content layer of each scene insert and position your content/txt for that scene.

Now turn your menu items into button instances and give them the actionscript to jump to the different scenes in the movie.
For example, the button for scene 2 would have code something like this:

on (press) {
gotoAndPlay (“Scene 2”, 1);
}

Once you have the menu buttons sorted copy and paste them to the menu layer in the different scenes and bob’s your ankle!
I hope this helps as i’ve gotta sort out some preloader headaches.

jim vallely

4

its funny how complicated they made it sound when its really an easy thing to do.

layers, you dont really need, only if you want to stay more organized. same goes for labels and all that.

if you want a basic website, just look at each section as a frame. frame one is home, 2 is section 2, 3 is section 3, so on. make a button that when clicked goes to 2, where a new section is presented.

any questions, please feel free to reply here or email me. and again, its really alot easier then it sounds. :slight_smile:

5

Thanks for all your help. I did the thing with the scenes, and this works, but I was wondering what is the most commonly used method for constructing a Flash-based site? Is is using scenes, or frames, or what about the load movie command?

6

I NEVER use scenes cuz they can screw up you whole site.
I use frames and movieclips and of course loadmovie.

7

i think frames and load movie with movieclips works best personally, just thought frames by themselves would be easiest

plus when using scenes people can right click your movie (if you dont have the code to prevent it) and skip around your site by clicking play which isnt good at all