A few amateur questions: Freeway and Flash and Dreamweaver

On May 1, 2008, at 1:11 PM, Rocky Slaughter wrote:

Thanks to everyone who can answer these questions as I know these
are probably very basic.
I have been using Freeway for about one month now and I have some
questions to get the most of out of my experience.

#1
Is it possible to take content generated on flash and insert it
into a Freeway site? Is it possible to view Freeway sites in
Dreamweaver to edit the code manually? Is it possible to view and
edit Dreamweaver sites on Freeway?

Yes, you can put Flash into Freeway. Flash is just a “noisy picture”.
You drag one to the page, or draw a box and import it like any other
art or plug-in content. Freeway writes all the browser-sniffing stuff
to get around Microsoft’s back, etc…

Only reason I ask is because it seems like Freeway doesn’t do quite
enough for what I want to do, and I would really like to integrate
all three pieces of software.

It might be helpful if you post a specific thing that you are looking
to do, because someone will most likely tell you the “Freeway way” to
do what you want. I would be very surprised if there wasn’t a way to
do almost anything you want.

You can open the published site in Dreamweaver – it’s just good
valid HTML. DW cannot open a Freeway document (nothing but Freeway
can). But realize that if you make changes to your site in DW, you
cannot go back to Freeway and make further edits without overwriting
your DW changes. Freeway considers HTML to be an artifact of the
publishing process – once it writes out the HTML, it never looks at
it again. The Freeway file is the master document for your entire
site, and is the authoritative version of your design intent in all
cases.

#2
I notice that after I upload all of my Freeway sites, and I go to
view the sites on a PC, my whole page is filled with “itembc4d”
messages when the mouse rolls over an image part of the website.
Is there anyway to fix this to where I can program what it will say
when the mouse rolls over that particular piece of text?

That’s called Alt text, and Mac browsers know better than to show it.
If you want to change what each item says, click on the image in
question, then look in the Output tab of the browser for the Alt text
field, and enter what you like there. There is also a dialog in
Freeway 5 to edit all the alt text in a page: Page / Alt Text from
the main menu.

#3

Is there any possible way to know for sure that all my photos and
graphics are uploaded to the website at 100% quality? I know that
Freeway cuts down a lot of pictures to make for easier and quicker
viewing, but I don’t have too much to upload, and I hate suffering
picture quality.

If you have made your images web-ready already (and if you’re new to
Freeway, you may think that this is important to do) then simply
import them as Pass-through images. If you have made an image web-
ready and you subsequently make its quality 100%, all you will do is
make the file size of the image larger, without adding any quality.
Further, if you have made your images web-ready in another
application, and then place them in Freeway as regular images, you
are double-compressing your images, which makes them larger (file
size) and blurrier, because the artifacts of JPEG compression look
like detail to be sharpened by the algorithm on the second pass.

So what’s a person to do? Simple. Use Photoshop or TIFF or PNG-24 or
some other non-lossy format, at high resolution, directly in your
Freeway layout. Freeway’s image processing engine will automatically
convert these images to web-quality, and you will gain the ability to
scale and crop without introducing further loss (either of your time
in having to bounce back to another application, or quality, from
zooming up a low-resolution image).

#4

Is there any way to control the margin colors of the page? That
is, the color of the background BEHIND the webpage you have
created? If you create a website at 700px by 700 px, for example,
a high resolution monitor will show a lot more of whichever
background color I select. I have seen many sites have different
images or colors in the margins. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Search the forum for page on a page or page borders – this has been
discussed endlessly, and it’s very simple to do.

#5, The most complicated…

I have seen sites before that have a very consistent header with a
navigation bar. When links are clicked, only the parts under the
navigation bar change. I know that I can use a master page to
program every page to look similar, especially in the header
part… but…
When I click on the links for the navigation bar, the new page
“resets” and opens scrolled all the way to the top. I would like
my page to stay in the same position when someone tries to move
around. The only solution I see to this is to put the Navigation
Bar on the top of the page so that the user would be forced to be
scrolled all the way up in order to change the page.

This explanation is fairly vague and I would be more than happy to
elaborate if it doesn’t make sense.

Basically:

Here is my Page…

Top of the Page
Image with Logo
Some text
Navigation Bar that goes horizontally across the screen.

If the user is scrolled down so that only the Navigation Bar
appears at the top, and then clicks on one of the links… They
will be redirected to another page on my site, but reset so that
their screen top is the Top of the Page.

You can get this effect using a Frameset, but that’s a very ugly
thing to do to a Web page, since it breaks search engines and the
back button, etc.

You could try putting your navigation in a floating layer (draw an
HTML box, and make sure the Layer checkbox is checked in the
Inspector), and then set that layer to Fixed position using the
Inspector. The rest of the page will scroll “under” the navigation
bar, which will always stay at the same position relative to the
page. Note that this will not work correctly in IE 6 and lower (the
navigation will simply scroll with the page), but then not much else
does, either.

Thanks for all the help. I shall do something nice for someone who
can answer these questions.


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