Welcome
to our Amara Menu and Banner Builder™ tutorial. Although the application is pretty
easy to use, I have created a step-by-step menu tutorial
to make sure that absolutely everybody can create Adobe Flash Player compatible web menus for their website.
How
to create a navigation menu?
1)
First click on the "Menu" tab and enter the labels
of the desired buttons and sub buttons. Enter the required
URL's to jump to as well.
2) Click on "Generate and Display" to view the created
menu.
3) Click on the little "Dock" button to open up
a floating window where you can see the entire menu. (The
"Dock" button is the little square to the right
of the "Generate and display" button)
4) Click on the "Button" tab. This is where you
set the generic buttons and menu settings. I will not
go through all the options as they are self-explanatory, but will
highlight a couple of tricks that you can do with the application:
a)
Set the transparency of the sub button to 100, and disable
the shadow of the sub button. This will return a basic hyperlink
instead of a button. Click on "Generate and Display"
to see the result.
b)
Set the "Main Menu horizontal" to 0 to create a
menu bar without space between the buttons. Click
on "Generate and Display" to see the result.
c) The "Submenu Vertical" setting will move the
horizontal Submenu bar closer to the main buttons. Put it
to -3. Click
on "Generate and Display" to see the result.
d) If you do not want to have your menus scroll, move both
of the scroll speed sliders to the left. Note that you will
only see any result of this when the length of the buttons
exceeds the length of the movie.
5)
Click on the "General" tab to move on to the next
settings screen. I would like to highlight two issues in this
screen:
a)
To add a background picture to the menu, click on "Image"
and then click on the small box to the right side of the input
field. From here browse to your file and select it.
b)
If you use a submenu bar, you can add a slogan in the submenu
area, when there are no subbuttons displayed. To do this simply
enter some text in the "slogan text" input field.
Click
on "Generate and Display" to see the result.
6)
Click on fonts and colors to set the colors and font properties
of each button.
7)
Click on the sound tab to add background music and/or button
sound effects to the menu. Note that there is a "sound
directory" in your C:Program Files/Amara Menu Builder
directory.
8)
Click on the Effects tab to change some parameters related
to the fade in and fade out of the sub menu.
9)
To save the Flash Menu, you must click on "Generate and
Display" and then on the "Save tab/Save SWF button"
10)
Note that the application also generates the required HTML
code. Depending on your HTML editor you might need to
copy and paste this code. In general I would recommend
that you use our code. Please also check out the Flash
html tutorials page, with tutorials for the respective
HTML editors.
