This may be the entirely wrong place to post, but a friend of mine directed me to this site stating this was the place to find the answer to anything flash related.
Simply put, I have a website written (I believe) in HTML with frames and what-not, and it has a simple grahics menu system. This has served me well until now. The website is for a development, and as more phases come online the rooms for links has run out, and I’m wanting to create a flash drop-down menu that will give me ample room to display whatever links may be needed. I know nothing about flash, downloaded the Macromedia Flash demo, and was totally lost and just don’t have the time to learn it. Thus, I found a program online that creates “easy” flash menus, and it seems to work really well. I have created a few flash menus I love, but I’ve now come to find that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Here’s my problem: I’ve been using Dreramweaver 8.0 to maintain the site, and to date everything has been easy. The person who designed the website did a great job making most things easy to edit since all I mainly do is change stuff within the existing “frames”. However, those neat little frames are now annoying little pests. Right now, the ONLY way I can figure out how to make the flash menu “float” WITH the webpage is to embed it within a frame on the page. The drawback to this is there’s a huge blank area one the page leaving room for the dropdown menu to show its entire contents. It makes the page look awkward and eliminates the benfit I’m trying to gain by using a dropdown menu. The other thing I tried was inserting the HTML code generated by the program (the program by the way is “Flash Menu Factory”) into the website’s code, and it did work just like I had intended. It sits “on top” of the other website information, and the dropdown menus nicely drop down over the page when activated, but when not in use are tucked away nicely at the top. The bad thing? The menu bar is fixed on the screen. In other words, the original web page always centers itself when you resize the browser window, but the flash menu stays in exactly one spot. I have created the following two links to give you an example (sorry it looks sloppy–I haven’t tried to place the menu in a certain location since I haven’t figured this out):
For the flash on top of the rest of the site content (yet won’t stay in place when you resize your browser window), the link is
http://www.theridgeatsouthmountain.com/index4.html
For the flash menu in a fixed frame, the link is
http://www.theridgeatsouthmountain.com/index5.html
You can see how the menu is cut off because the fram is too small. The frame would have to be HUGE to catch all of the drop down options in the future. The big difference in the above two after combing through the HTML code is the command “position: absolute” in the index4 version. I’m assuming this is what’s keeping it in one place, and as soon as I move that portion of the code it drops in into the frames on the page and messes up the formatting. Lastly, I could use a horizontal bar like the following
http://www.theridgeatsouthmountain.com/index6.html
but here again, in time that would be limiting since it’s horizontal. Essentially, I’m looking for a mix between index4 and index5. Or is this even possible? Any help anyone could give me would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!!!
P.S. I’ve also contacted two people in my area that do websites, but they don’t do flash. I have no problem paying someone to do this for me, but I’d like to leave it as something easily editable in case I want/need to chenge the menu, structure, etc.
