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We attempt to explain why you might want Fireworks and what to use it for and how to create pictures and menus on a page that has possibly html and possibly php script on it as well. In other words How do you integrate Fireworks elements with both HTML and Server Side Scripting so the page is both attractive, easy to use and is also Search Engine Friendly?We aim to keep the instructions and details of use of Fireworks simple to follow and easy to understand, but at the same time we want to create something visually interesting and something that looks crisp and professional and pleasing to look at. We start off with : "What is fireworks and what's it good for?" The short answer is that it is a piece of software, and many people get it as part of the Dream weaver MX Suite of programs. The Dream weaver suite of programs is Dream weaver, Flash, Fireworks and Free Hand and may include Contribute but we will not consider Contribute in this series of articles, we concentrate on Fireworks MX. Fireworks is a program for handling pictures on your Web page, these pictures may be jpg digital pictures but may also be pictures you have scanned and or graphical elements you have created yourself. Also the graphics may include many useful things such as navigation bars and banners that are static or animated. We are not going to list every job that fireworks is good for here, but if you follow this articles you will pick up some ideas I assure you.
"Why use fireworks in the construction of a web page?" If you want to place pictures on your web page, and you want to possibly place an attractive navigation menu on the page and you want to make sure that the page will display well at common screen resolutions then Fireworks is the tool to use. There are a few things to learn, we will detail them but will not try to cover too many principles at once. if you have some pictures that are large and thus large files you can optimize them using fireworks so they still look good but do not take too long to down load.... You do not want to create a Web page that takes ages to download. You can also create graphics that line up nicely so the finished page looks crisp and slick. "Lovely graphics and SEO?" Remember that graphics and pictures and and any free hand graphics you create can not be read by Search Engine Robots and Spiders, thus putting all your text into a graphical image will mean that that text can not be indexed by most if not all search engines. So best to have part of your page as graphics that look good and make the page attractive, but have some text and hyperlinks on the page that are not part of any graphics. Or put another way have some links to other pages that work from within the pictures and graphics but have some plain HTML Hyperlinks on the same page! See our pages on SEO here Or here "Sizes of Images and the Computer Screen and why can you only save Fireworks documents as .png format only?" We are not going to explain in detail about all the common panes in Fireworks here except a very brief mention of the main ones. When you open Fireworks you should see a menu at the top of the page,(running across the page like you do with most windows applications) plus a "tool box" floating towards the left hand side of the screen, you should see also some pains (seen as blue horizontal bars on the right of the screen) the main ones are Optimize, Assets, Frames and History and Layers.In the very Center of the screen is a box, at the top of this it says Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004.( you may be using Studio 8, this is the newer version of Dream weaver MX Suite.) This box is where you open previous Fireworks pages from and where you create a New Fireworks File. Below is a little table, Take note... This is important, you should look at this and pay attention to it, even book mark this page as it is important... you always want to create a fireworks document that will fit nicely on a page displayed by a computer screen via a browser.
It is of course the document sizes that you need to pay attention to. Thus if you are building a page that you want displayed well on a Desk Top Size 1280 x 1024 the above table is not much help. But many people still use a screen size of 800 X 600, especially on smaller monitors, so its a good bet to create the canvas size of you fireworks document (file) as 760 x 420. If you create a new fireworks document the default size that the software picks is just that 760 X 420, so stick to that. To create a new document or file in Fireworks first Open Fireworks ( "Double click on the Fireworks icon on your Desk Top" ) Then point your mouse to create new Fireworks File. A box opens, notice the width, height and resolution and Canvas co lour is set, but you can change these, whilst learning fireworks just be happy with the defaults, because these are good for small screens and will mean you created page will display properly on a 15 " monitor. super.Read more |
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