Flash® CS4 for Dummies®

Chapter 8. Pushing Buttons

In This Chapter

• Making simple buttons

• Testing your buttons

• Moving on to more complex buttons

When you view a Web page, you click buttons to move to other pages or sites. As you probably know, these buttons are graphical images, but they're hyperlinks as well. If you start to pay attention to these buttons, you see that some of them change when you pass your mouse cursor over them. They change again when you click them. Occasionally, they make a sound when you click them.

Flash can create these types of buttons and more. You can animate Flash buttons so that they move or rotate when viewers pass their cursors over them or click them. You can add interactive controls (actions) to buttons so that passing over or clicking them starts other movies or creates other effects.

In this chapter, you find out how to create buttons that look the way you want. You also discover how to make more complex buttons that include sounds, movie clips, and simple ActionScript. To discover more about ActionScript and interactivity, see Chapter 10.

Creating Simple Buttons

Before you create a button, stop and think about what you want the button to accomplish on a Web page and how you want it to look. When designing a Web site's navigation, designers often create a series of similar buttons that lead to pages within a site. This similarity provides a coherent style for the site. Buttons ...