MS FrontPage

DHTML: Adding Interactivity

The average Web surfer has clicked through thousands of Web pages. Your visitors have seen it all, and getting them to notice your site and its content can be a challenge. One trick still seems to grab the attention of even the most jaded reader: action.

FrontPage lets you animate page elements in response to visitors' clicks and the pages they visit. For instance, if a mouse passes over a button, you can make the button pop up and become 3-dimensional. Or if a visitor clicks on the name of a neighborhood poof!a map of the area can suddenly appear out of nowhere.

FrontPage makes it easy to bring your pages to life. Animating Web elements used to require complex scripting, but once again, FrontPage saves you from all that by providing you with easy-to-use dialog boxes.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create rollover buttons, cascading menus, play sounds, and display pop-up windows and messages. You can even automatically reroute your visitors to a different Web page. You'll learn to do all these things with FrontPage DHTML (short for Dynamic HTML) effects and behaviors. At the end of the tutorial, you'll put all these skills to work with a tutorial that helps you create one of those slick, cascading drop-down menus that you see on really professional-looking Web sites.

Tip: Use the animation and interactive behaviors presented in this tutorial with care. Overloading your viewers is a big danger here. Too much movement on a site distracts people from the point you're trying to make and can even annoy them.