Image Map

In addition to using text to hyperlink, I switched it up a little and used an image map with hotspots; this located in Board Members page of my site.  The photo I chose was suppose to be tongue and cheek.  Since the theme was Old Time Photography, I used a photo of some old time photographers to graphically represent the trustees of the club's board.  If you hover your mouse over some of these gentlemen and then click, it will send you to their bio on the same page. 

My New Web Site

I just finished my Web site. Although I am using the same domain name, the site has totally been reconstructed. Please visit and poke around a bit.  Also use the Membership application form to leave a comment about the site. I will write some subsequent posts on the technical aspects of building the site.  


I do want to begin by writing about how I got to the theme of the Web site.  I really was not too happy with my first idea, which was the chronicling of a novice Web designer using specific software. For this reason, I decided to use the previous site as a way to complete the tutorials and then start all over with a new Web site for my project. 


After a week or two, I came up with the idea of a group of people wanting to preserve an art form that is becoming extinct and this is film photography. Kodak's January 2012 bankruptcy claim is the testament that this art form will to die off soon since the largest film manufacturer will no longer be there to support it. However, I have a great deal of respect and admiration for diehards not wanting to relent to pixels, so here it is the  theme of my Web site; a film photography club. I am just sorry that this is fictional.  I have not been in a darkroom for over twenty years and would really like to pick it up again ( I still have my stainless steel developer cans and my Nikon FM10 SLR).  I wish there were such a club in my town.  Maybe when I retire I can start one.  


Well anyway please visit and here is the link:  http://www.vlayag.com/ .  

Godzilla Files

I loved the idea of being able to make animated graphics with Flash, although I have only made two so far.  One the button which worked great providing I don't add the doorbell chime and the other was the pencil.  The button was killing me and I could not leave it alone and double checked my code as Katy's suggested.  So far it is still not working.  I have abandoned this for now and moved on.


So off to the next tutorial, which was how to make a video for the Web with Flash.  Super cool since I wanted to incorporate a video in my blog. This was going  to be a 4 minute presentation  heavy with graphics and other videos and some text and a soundtrack of me narrating.


I used Prezi, a presentation software to create the show and then used Jing to record the slideshow presentation with a soundtrack.  I really liked the way it turned out, but the file was huge 182MB large and it would not play smoothly on my blog.  I thought maybe it was the photos, but Prezi automatically compressed the images into smaller file sizes.  I found out from a friend that SWF are typically mega-large and are really not Web friendly for videos.  Now off to make the file smaller and optimize it for the Web.  I thought since Flash creates SWF files it might open them to make it editable.  It did not UGHHH!!!!  I scouted around for free software and found one that I was able to reduce the size to 30 MB.  Wow...now that's compression.


Here are the links to Prezi and Jing.   They are super neat tools that help with incorporating neat features to your blog or Web site.

Prezi Presentation

Jing Screen Capture

An Interactive Feature-The Feedback Form

Click on this link http://www.vlayag.com/ to see my Web site progress.  Also, it would be great if you can fill out a feedback form.

The Most Annoying Button

I just added sound to my button.  The problem I am having is that it will not sync with the event handler  Mouse Click Event.  The bell begins to ring as soon as the test window opens and does not wait for a mouse click.  In addition, the sound plays differently from the original file and repeats itself.  Eventually it does end.


Below is an example of what I just described.  I think I may have just annoyed everyone here at home including my cat.  He usually sits with me while I do my homework. If anyone has any suggestions please write back.  Thanks.

Hyperlinking

Sorry about last week, it was hairy at work and I had to work too many hours!!! Thankfully this week was a little easier, and I was able to complete the “make your Web site somewhat dynamic lesson.” I am very excited since hyperlinking is how the World Wide Web works. To find what we want, we jump from one Web page to another Web page using hyperlinks. In this exercise I used both absolute and relative URLs. 

Take a look at the properties panel and you will find the Target field.
For this link I wanted the new page to  open up
either in a new tab in Chrome or in a new window in Explorer.

I added the absolute URLs in the logo image and two of the four text links in the navigation pane. The addition of the link for the logo image was pretty straight forward. Since, I wanted to credit Microsoft for the image used on my site, I linked the MS Image Web page to the logo image field. As for the navigation links, I edited the text first and then added the links. I also played around with the Target field located in the properties panel. The target controls how the link page should behave when called. There are five choices in the drop-down field; I discovered that three of the five behave the same way; the linked paged replaced the current page.  The other two, _new and _blank opened the linked page onto a new tab in Chrome and a new page in Explorer.  

The relative URL needed a little more work and was not as straight forward as the absolute. Here I had to direct the hyperlink to exactly where the file for my pencil project slide show is saved. In this case the folder is labeled animations; I also created folders for images and another for background.  This may seem too much organization, but as I add multiple pages to the site this will allow me to easily locate elements for the individual pages of my site. The image on the left shows my simple folder structure in Dreamweaver.  I will most likely add more folders as I add more elements to the site. 

Note:  Follow my Web site (www.vlayag.com) progress and read my breaking news for March 11, 2012.  

Dreamweaver Chapter 4

If you were to visit the homepage of my developing Web site, you may have guessed that green is my favorite color. It does not matter what hue it comes, I tend to derive a sense of peace and confidence from it. Who knows, maybe my baby nursery was green and it subliminally conjures happy and sweet memories. But whatever it is, I am glad we are at this point that we can change the background color of our Web page. 

To make the changes to the background colors, I clicked on the individual areas of the index page. For example, the first place that I edited was the area next to where my logo is located. Since I was not sure what class this area was referencing, I clicked on it and looked for the class in the Properties tab located at the bottom on the Dreamweaver page. I discovered that all its formatting rules originated from the class “header.”  I then went to the CSS Styles panel on the upper right hand corner and double clicked on header.  From there I chose “Background” under category field and looked for a new background color from the fly-out swatch that appears when you click on the down arrow. 

I poked around a bit to see which colors would work form me.  I chose #696, which is a green with a slight yellow tint. I made note of the number because I wanted to use the color again somewhere else on the index page. As it turns out I did use the color in the container and the navigation panels; this gave the page a finished and coordinated look.

I also wrote a little “Breaking News” for February 25, 2012. 

To follow my progress, here is the link to my Website http://www.vlayag.com/ .