Building Flash® Web Sites For Dummies®

Chapter 7. Making Your Site Interactive

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Mastering the Actions panel

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Using the goto and stop actions

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Navigating to another Web page

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Loading external content

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Working with variables

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When you create your Flash Web site, you increase the horsepower when you add cool animations, but you turbocharge the site when you add ActionScript. With ActionScript, you can load additional content into your Flash interface and use variables to dispense and store information — the variables giveth, and they taketh away. ActionScript is similar to JavaScript, but with one important exception: You don’t have to know code to create ActionScript. All you have to do is know how to use the Actions panel and master the actions you use frequently. In this chapter, I show you the stuff you need to know to make your site interactive.

Adding Sizzle to the Steak with ActionScript

When you need to do something that’s illegal, immoral, or fattening, use ActionScript. Kidding! But seriously folks, ActionScript is what you need to take your site from “Oh look, Ethel, it’s another Flash site” to something that will rock your viewer’s world. ActionScript, like the proverbial well, is deep. But you don’t have to dive to dizzying depths to add sizzle to your site. And you don’t have to learn all 4,258 actions to add interactivity to your site. (Well, there aren’t ...