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Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Dreamweaver Flash Buttons only allowing one link

Using Flash Buttons in Dreamweaver can be a little confusing. You would think that you are creating a Flash graphic and that you can change the link as you like on different pages, but this is not so.

Flash buttons have the link built in. If you use the same Flash button on a different page it will retain the same link. No way around this. If you want a button on a different page that goes to a different location you will need to create a new Flash button for that link.

So think of it this way, for each link to a specific page you need a separate Flash button. You can then use that Flash button on any page that you want to have that link. So, each new link gets its own Flash button.

Personally I never use Flash buttons, mostly because of this limitation. I create all of my buttons from scratch in Photoshop as images, I also create a second version to use as a rollover image. Then when I use those in my web pages I can put any link I want on them, since images don't store link info, the link info is specific to the image use on the one page.

But to be complete on this discussion, if you have a button that says one thing (like HOME) in your web site, that button should always go to that one page link, no matter what page it is used on. This is a usability issue, where people will expect a certain button to do the same thing each time they click on it no matter what page they find the button on. So in this respect the Flash buttons are behaving properly by only accepting one link.

Hope this helps,

George