It Doesn't Hurt to Try New Things

Web site construction can be a tedious, frustrating, time-consuming thing, but if you're going to do it, might as well go all out. This means trying new things with it and giving your site plenty of features that will make the netizen's life easier.

This week I'll take a look at pop-up windows, jump menus, playing a sound and last week's rerun -- the swap image.

Not only can these features make the netizen's life easier, but they can also keep them more interested and entertained by your work.

Let's lead off with the creation of a pop-up window. Instructions for this process can be found at entheosweb.com, where they also provide the function and links codes for people who do not have Microsoft Dreamweaver.

Following the steps I was able to open a new window, although you may get stuck at steps 3 and 5 (like I did). I've been working with Dreamweaver for a couple of months, but by no means am I an aficionado -- as a result, I had trouble finding the plus symbol in step 3 and deciding on what to specify the width as in step 5.

The use of jump menus can consolidate a surplus of links. Here you can look at the steps for creating a jump menu. Once you've located the plus symbol in the steps for the pop-up window, this process becomes much easier. The six steps are fairly simple and as you can see you can tag as many links as u would like with the +/- option.

I didn't make any permanent changes to my Web site but for practice I used the links to ESPN, the University of Connecticut and Yahoo! Sports. Seemed to work just fine, I usually get more frustrated with a bunch of steps being thrown at me.

The difficulties emerged, however, when it came to playing a sound. The instructions say it can be done in two simple steps, but for some reason I'm stuck on step 1. I've never created a link before so I tried the simple suggestion of "#" but it failed. I'm sure I'm overlooking something specific but after a few attempts I'm moving on to round 2 with the swap image.

If you've been reading weekly, you know the swap image gave me quite a headache a couple weeks back. If you follow that link the steps are there, but the first thing that jumps out at me is where it says, "Swap images are fun and easy to design."

Oh, I beg to differ.

But before I go off on a rant about my prior struggles with the swap image, let's jump back into the steps. This set of instructions is entirely different from the list that gave me trouble last time. Most helpful are the pictures that have the specific boxes to click clearly circled in red. Thank you very much for that.

Step 3, slicing the images was a problem for me, as was step 5 and exporting the entire file. After battling back and forth with those steps, while breezing through the others, I'm left with my name (in yellow) popping up over a blue box I initiated with. I don't know if this is a rollover or swap image but it certainly looks like something.

For my satisfaction's sake let's assume it's a swap image. Thus, the deed is done and the battle with technology is over...for now.