Having some difficulties

[Atomic_Sheep]

Hi guys, I just d/l a trial version of xara web design because I heard it was the fastest and the easiest program to use for flash designs but I'm having trouble with figuring out whats what.

I want to design a website that has no page loading. In other words, rather than the page reloading after every click of a link, I just want the certain changes to be made without reloading the page. Similar to the website below:

http://www.ndesign-studio.com/demo/schoen/

My first problem is to do with the nav bars. Lets say I have three links at the moment:
__________
HOME PAGE|
_________ |
LINKS
PHOTOS

The box around Home Page is essentially a strip of a different colour to the text and the background and appears under the text for whatever page you are on. If you clicked Links, then the strip would slide from under Home Page and one would slide under Links and the new state would look something like this:

HOME PAGE
__________
LINKS |
_________ |
PHOTOS

The text that was displayed under Home Page I want to fade out and be replaced with a fade in text relevant to Links.

The other thing that I want to have is a roll over effect. When you are on any page and you roll over any of the other links then I want another strip to slide out and "highlight" that selection... so if we were on the links page as before and rolled over the Home Page link, we would have something like this:

__________
HOME PAGE|
__________
LINKS |
_________ |
PHOTOS

Obviously when you move the mouse away from the Home Page link without making the selection, the strip would simply slide back off screen. Is this whole thing even possible with xara? If so, how? I'm very confused by the whole layer technique in the program and no matter what I do, nothing seems to work and I end up having a static image no matter what.

[rickasaurus]

You need to think carefully before building a website which is totally flash, like the example you quoted. It is not correct that the pages have no loading. On clicking one of the menu items, the flash movie has to download and open. In the case of that website, it took quite some time for each flash page to open, and each page contained very little factual information of use to potential purchasers.

Also, in that website, there is virtually no content visible to search engines.

In my opinion, flash can be very useful, but it needs to be applied in moderation and for a specific purpose.

Rick

[steve.ledger]

Xara Xtreme and Xara Web Designer are capable of creating flash animations, but they are not comparable to flash authoring tools like Swish Max etc.

If you haven't already, read through the WD help file section What Xara Web Designer features does Flash support? for a more detailed description of what Xara flash can do for you.

And Welcome to the TG Forums

Oh and some useful information about Google's ability to index flash files.

[Atomic_Sheep]

I'm not worried about my website not comming up in google searches as one of the first results. In fact, I don't expect to have much traffic on it at all and the people that need to know about it, will know about it. It's more of a fun thing that I want to do.

As for the loading issue, I know it loads the other pages it's just that it's seemless whilst doing so which is the effect that I'm after.

Having read the "What Xara Web Designer features does Flash support?" I can say that it didn't really tell me with what xara can and can't do. I'm more of a handsony sort of person and don't respond well to descriptions of features because I need to see them to understand what they are. But I'm pretty sure what I want made isn't complex enough for xara not to be able to make it. I've seen some youtube videos that appereared to have used certain techniques that I'm pretty sure would be used to create what I want, it's just that I've been unable to do so. The particular video that I'm talking about is one that demonstrates how to create windows start menu style buttons on your webpage. Also I think I saw a video where by clicking the link button, you were able to link the navigation button to a particular layer of your website which is what I thought would have to be done in order to create the seemless transitions.