Linking flash menu to urls + preloader issue

I have a menu bar in my (Dreamweaver created) web site with various buttons that link to other pages of the site. At the moment I am using the ‘get URL’ command followed by the full web site address eg www.address.com to locate the other pages.

Is there a better way of doing this that links to the web pages locally within its own structure. i.e without sending a full web page command? Obviously the method I am using doesnt allow me to check my web site offline while I’m trying to work on it.

Also - the flash menu bar has a preloader. The links to the pages work but when it first opens you get a split second glimpse of the preloader page as it re-displays the same menu bar on the new page. Is there any way of preventing this. I dont want to use split frames.

Reverend D

For the second part of question: get rid of the preloader!? Optimize.

Sussed the preloader
your right - optimised the file by imbedding the fonts rather than dropping the odd bit of styled text to make it look right.

My bad.

Any thoughts on the first part of my question?

If the pages you’re calling from your menu are in the same directory as the page with the menu, you merely refer to them directly in your HTML.

(here I’ll use backets [] rather than carets <>)

[a href=“nextpage.html”]menu topic[/a]

but, if the page you want is in another directory of the same root, then you have to affix a …/dirname/ in front of the html page’s file name:

[a href="…/otherdirectory/otherpage.html"]menu item[/a]

The other common situation is to be at the root level for your index.html page (typically a splash page), then you would want to go down into a subdirectory with this kind of structure

[a href=“somedirectory/firstpage.html”]menu item[/a]

Remember, of course that the brackets here would be replaced by carets, and your file names and directory names would appear in place of the examples I’ve used.

These kinds of files would be ones that exist on your hard drive that you’ve uploaded to your web hosting service. It is critical to maintain the same directory structure on your local drive as you have with your web host. In this way, you can debug your website locally before uploading and without going online. Obviously, you will not have access to external web sites when offline, but you can catch most of the common scripting errors this way.

Finally, it’s really better to learn some basic HTML rather than relying on a WYSIWYG editor like Frontpage.

I think.
:cool:
sp

Thanks for the response

I understand the principle of what you were suggesting and I had already tried the line -
[a href=“nextpage.html”][/a]
but this just causes explorer to re-reload my index page, but displays it as a blank sheet (??) - but it does display the correct path to the index file in my local drive when testing.

I’m not sure what you mean by the ‘menu topic’ part of the command.

Cheers - Reverend D

the ‘menu topic’ is just my arbitrary filler to show the ‘hot’ part of an HTML link. Of course, for Flash, you don’t need this, because you’d using a button.

I’m not sure if you’re trying to do this from within Flash or before your flash loads, with HTML.

if HTML, then ‘menutopic’ (or whatever) is the ‘hot’ part of the link which the user clicks on. the [/a] terminates the ‘hot’-ness. You didn’t include anything in that field in your example, so there’s nothing to click on.

If you’re trying to this from within flash, then you don’t need the carets, the ‘hot’ text, or the closing [/a], but the link structure would be the same

“yourlink.html” for flash, or

[a href=“yourlink.html”]hottext[/a] for html.

So, in HTML, the user would see the word ‘hottext’ and would click on that to get the page ‘yourlink.html’

In flash, they’d see your button which would use ‘get url’ (with yourlink.html between the quotes) to take them to that page.

:cool:
sp

Thanks again.

The link from the button to the html page is being created in the flash action script. When I was trying to link to a page within Flash ‘locally’, it either jumped back out to the web to try a find a new web site by the name of my page or it came out blank.

I thought it needed some code to link through, not just a plain old simple “page.html”.

All is now well - thanks for your patience - your a star

I’m off to feel stupid somewhere -
Reverend D