Use interactive buttons to add special effects to your Web site

Buttons | interaction

You don't have to be an image-processing or programming expert to add a feature button to a Web page-you can use interactive buttons through FrontPage 2003.

These buttons are rich in color and have a professional look, as created by using advanced image editing tools. Unlike standard buttons, the appearance changes when you move the mouse pointer over the button or click.

　　Add an interactive button to a Web page

To add an interactive button, click where you want to add the button on the page. On the Insert menu, click Interactive Buttons. When the Interactive Buttons dialog box is displayed, select the button style, appearance, and behavior.

　　How to make an interactive button look the way you want

When you add interactive buttons, you can select shapes, colors, decorations, borders, font styles, and font sizes. The shapes include rounded, rectangular, capsule-like and label-like. The button can be shiny or not shiny, or has an angled angle.

You can use the buttons tab in the Interactive Buttons dialog box to select a button style, button text, and a link to a button to another page in the current Web site, a Web site on the World Wide Web, or an e-mail address.

With the Font tab, in addition to the font style and font size you can select, you can also set the alignment of the button text and select the font color for each button state: initial font color, font color when hovering (hover the mouse pointer over a button), and font color when pressed.

Using the Image tab, you can resize the button image. Because you cannot resize a button in design view as you would any other type of image, you are particularly reminded to note it. In addition, you can select the file format for the button image here.

Select button Image File Format

To make sure that you save the button image as a JPEG or GIF file, note the following:

　　Jpeg

The advantages of the JPEG file format include the ability for FrontPage to provide color gradients and more complex button-style effects such as wedges, emboss, and glow styles.
The disadvantages include a solid color background for JPEG images. If your page background is solid, you can make the background color of the button match the background color of the page. However, if your Web page does not have a solid background, the JPEG-formatted button will not display correctly.

　　Gif

The advantages of the GIF file format are that you can provide a transparent background color. Therefore, if the button has a rounded edge, the background color of the Web page can be displayed.

The disadvantage is that GIF displays only 256 colors, sometimes not enough to show the effects of gradient colors and more complex button styles. Some color gradients on the edge of the button and on the button may be rough compared to the JPEG file format.

　　The status of the interactive button image

If you insert an interactive button, FrontPage automatically creates three separate images that represent the three states in which the site visitor interacts with the button: the initial state, the hover state, and the pressed state. When you save a Web page, FrontPage prompts you to save the button image file at the same time.

When you save the button for the first time, FrontPage automatically provides three default button image file names. These file names begin with the word "button" and end with a unique value, such as a number or letter.

We recommend that you rename the image files appropriately so that you can distinguish different images in the list of image file names in the future. As shown in the following example: Holiday1.jpg, Holiday2.jpg, holiday3.jpg.

　　Note If you delete an interactive button from a Web page, the three images associated with the button are not deleted. To permanently delete these image files, you must manually delete them separately.