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Using Interactive Buttons
Creating buttons for Web sites is a fairly straightforward process. You
create a button with a graphics program, then save that button to your Web site,
and then create a hyperlink that sends the person clicking that button to a
different Web page. You can make buttons even more effective when you use a
different button for links, hovered links, and links to the page you are
currently on ("pressed" links). Normally you would go back to your graphics
program to create 3 different versions of each button you need, and then you
would be tasked with finding some JavaScript code to create the hovered and
pressed effects and then you would have to figure out how to get it to work in
your Web page. This process can be tedious and time-consuming, and must be
repeated when the button title changes.
Microsoft® Office FrontPage®
2003 greatly streamlines this process of creating buttons with new interactive buttons.
Interactive buttons allow you to choose from many ready-made buttons, then
specify the text you want on each button, and then when you save your Web page,
buttons are automatically created for you for normal, hovered, and pressed
states. You don't even need to use a graphics program to create buttons with
FrontPage 2003 interactive buttons, and they are easily edited when button
titles change.
Here are interactive buttons created in only minutes with FrontPage 2003. Be
sure to hover your mouse over them to see the hover effects.
Here are the steps to follow to use interactive buttons.
- Open FrontPage 2003 and the page you want to insert interactive buttons
into.
- Position your cursor where you want the first interactive button to
appear.
- Click Interactive Button on the Insert menu. The
Interactive Buttons dialog box opens.
- Click the button you would like to use on the Button tab.
- Type the text you would like to appear on the button in the Text: field.
- Type the URL you want the button to link to in the Link: field.
- Click the Font tab. The Interactive Buttons dialog box changes to
look like this:
- Specify the fonts, font color, and horizontal alignments you want to use
for each of the buttons.
- Click the Image tab. The Interactive Buttons dialog box changes to
look like this:
- Change the width and height of the button to suit the font you have chosen
and the length of the text you have specified.
- Click OK. Your new interactive button appears on your page.
- Save your Web page (click Save on the File menu).
Click OK when asked if you want to save the buttons. One graphic
file is saved for the normal, hovered, and pressed states for each button.
The
finance,
human resources, and
sales & marketing sample sites have custom
Interactive Buttons on their home pages.
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