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Updated 7-11-00
Copyright © 2000
McCord Consulting Group
       
How did you do those flyout menus?
The flyout menus were created in Macromedia's Dreamweaver and optimized by hand using Homesite HTML Editor. The menu actions are basically Javascript that controls different states of the buttons depending on what action is occurring. The menus flyout by using layers (DIV) and are turned on and off depending again, on the event handlers. A good tutorial for this can be found at Project VII website.

Why does a resize cause the screen to double flash?
When this site was developed, we chose to use the layer feature in HTML to get the flyout menus to work well. The layers are implemented very well in Internet Explorer version 4.0+. Unfortunately, Netscape's implementation is not quite perfect. When you resize the Netscape window, all hidden layers will suddenly become visible. To get around this, I set a onResize event in the BODY statement that triggered a Javascript function to reload the window. Since this function will cause problems within Internet Explorer, the browser type was filtered beforehand and the function is skipped if IE is detected.

What is all of that loading on the first screen?
Since we are using alot of small graphics in the flyout menu design, it makes it much smoother for the user to navigate with the graphical buttons available instantaneously. By using a loader statement in the BODY of the first page, we load all of the required button graphics for the flyouts BEFORE they are required. Then, as the menus flyout, the buttons are already in the browser cache.

Check back often for more tips and tricks.
Email all questions to webmaster@mccordcg.com