Tips and TricksTutorialsWeb Design

Questions from the week – 7 Aug 09

This week I’ve had quite a few questions from people regarding HTML Snippets and adding things to their iWeb site with them. So with that in mind you may notice a bit of a theme in this weeks ‘questions from the week’ post.

To begin with I have been asked a few times about adding a flash movie to an iWeb site.

To be honest this is one tutorial I have been loathe to publish as I have seen it covered on a few other Apple/Mac/iWeb tutorial sites and I didn’t want to start repeating content that was originally available elsewhere (I want you all to visit AAi because it is unique!!). Well, I bow to your demands, here is a quick run through of inserting a flash movie into your iWeb site.

For the purpose of this walkthrough I am assuming you already have a flash movie made up (either a SWF or a FLV file).

Open iWeb and insert an HTML Snippet.

When the transparent code window opens paste in the following code:

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540000" id="obj1"
codebase=http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/ flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0
border="0" width="450" height="300"><param name="movie"
value=http://www.yourdomain.com/folder/filename.swf>
<param name="quality" value="High"><embed src=http://www.yourdomain.com/folder/filename.swf
pluginspage=http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" name="obj1"
width="450" height="300"></object>

Anything that I have highlighted in red you can edit.

Hit the ‘Apply’ button, save the iWeb site and publish.

You will notice that there is 1 occurence of ‘src=’ in the code followed by a URL. This URL must link to the place where you have your Flash file stored. The same goes for ‘value=’

What you must do before opening iWeb is to create a folder either on your iDisk (where your iWeb site is stored) or on your FTP server and drop your flash file into it. The URL will then be the location of the folder where you have stored it.

You must also make sure that you get the height and width of your flash movie to match the figures in the code otherwise it will stretch out of proportion and look strange.

No ‘Go’ button please

Many of you have read (if my stats are right) the post I wrote a while back on inserting a drop-down menu into an iWeb site. It’s a neat way to provide navigation on your site other than the traditional nav-bar across the top. This week I received a few requests for the code for the menu, but without the ‘Go button’. So here it is:

<form>
<select id="menu" onchange="parent.window.location=this.value">
<option>Select a Page.</option>
<option value="http://www.yourdomain.com/page1.html">Page 1</option>
<option value="http://www.yourdomain.com/page2.html">Page 2</option>
<option value="http://www.yourdomain.com/page3.html">Page 3</option>
<option value="http://www.yourdomain.com/page4.html">Page 4</option>
<option value="http://www.yourdomain.com/page5.html">Page 5</option>
<option value="http://www.yourdomain.com/page6.html">Page 6</option>
</select>
</form> 

That’s all there is to it. Just make the red bits of the code fit to your iWeb site, all of the other information is in my previous post which I linked to just above.

I have designed an iWeb site but I want the Blog to be the first thing that visitors see rather than my home page. How do I do that?

In iWeb, to the left of the design pane is the list of sites and pages. Whatever page appears at the top of the list (for the relevant site if there is more than one) is the page that iWeb will assume is your home-page. To make your Blog the home-page on your iWeb site all you have to do is click on it in the left hand list and drag it up to the top of the page list so that it becomes the first page. Now just republish your site.

If you are using the default nav-bar it should also make the page move to the far left location on that.

That’s it for this week, but as usual if you have any iWeb questions that you think I may be able to help with, leave a comment or drop me a line through the contact page. Have a good weekend!!

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3 Comments

  1. Thanks.. Good tips, ‘ like them.
    Greetings from The Netherlands

  2. […] More: iWeb Questions of the week – 07 Aug 09 | All About iWeb […]

  3. Hi, is it possible to set the Google custom search field to #100 alpha and making a custom “go” buton?

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