Easily create menus for your website with SwishMax

Oct 24, 2007 17:21 GMT  ·  By

Site navigation represents an important factor that influences your web site accessibility. The site navigation menus could be created generally from static HTML links enhanced with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), Java applets, Javascripts and Flash scripts.

There are certain situations when you need a professional design for your web site navigation. In this case, Flash provides you many benefits in designing a navigation menu, such as: image quality, fast loading pages, various effects for buttons animation and more. You don't have to know Flash in order to design a menu. There are many standalone applications that run on your desktop and will generate the Flash scripts for you.

SwishMax is a Flash authoring tool that will allow you to create various Flash animations in a short time using a very friendly user interface. If you are used to manage a photo editor, you will learn rapidly all the SwishMax features.

On the Internet there are a lot of SwishMax website templates that can help you deploy your own flash based website. You can download any of those free templates and in order to build your flash menu, you must remove the unneeded elements and isolate the navigation menu. You can change or delete the buttons text, links, shape, animation effects only with a few mouse clicks. You must also resize the main Scene to the menu dimensions.

After the menu is ended, you should preview it using the SwishMax Test option, which allows you to view the actual behavior of your Flash file in a standalone Flash Player and in an Internet browser. If the links are not valid or you do not like the behavior of your menu from the point of view of animation effects, you should return to operate the appropriate modifications. And finally, you must export your Flash movie as HTML+SWF in order to have the HTML code to embed it easily in any HTML page.