Flash Animation 22: Flash for Web Design: GUI Design

If you switch back to your stage and Enable Simple Buttons, you can test your rollover before repeating it on the other buttons. This is nothing that we haven't learned before--but now you've used it to create a detailed graphical user interface for the web, without having to touch a single line of HTML or DHTML code, and with no potentially messy tables. Your website can be packaged all in one single web page, with everything that you need inside your Flash movie or referenced by it; this saves you the trouble of either saving multiple web pages over and over again to preserve your layout across each page, or creating a dynamic page with referenced layout headers and footers.

Of course, right now this isn't really a web page--it's just pretty rollover buttons. But you don't want to go assigning links to those buttons just yet; we want to keep everything internal without creating new layout pages, so we're going to work on using ActionScripts and frames in the next lesson to do that. For now, though, try exporting an HTML preview (File->Publish Preview->HTML) to see how your web page will look in a browser. Mine's here.