An object is the most basic creative element in SiteSpinner™. If a museum is your SiteSpinner™ project and the museum walls the pages of your project, then the paintings are the objects. The objects that you add to your pages are the substance of what visitors to your web site will see, hear, and experience. Consequently, the most fundamental and recurrent activity of building a web site using SiteSpinner™ is adding and editing objects.
The typical web site visitor has sophisticated expectations. With the many different types of objects available in your SiteSpinner™ tool kit, you can design and build a web site with sophisticated content and functionality. Among the types of objects are the following:
Text objects allow you to add and format text content.
You can organize the contents of a page with page headings that you create using Title objects.
You can add bars, boxes, borders, or other page layout elements using Rectangle or Horizontal or Vertical Line objects or Polygon or Curve vector drawing objects.
Navigation buttons are easy to create out of Rectangle, Triangle, Star, or Ellipse objects.
Image objects contain imported photographs or other image graphics.
If you know a little JavaScript, VBScript, or other scripting languages, you can add clever functionality to your web page using hidden Code objects.
With Table objects, you can easily organize and format photo galleries or lists.
Imported foreign objects are the workhorse of the group: Use them to add Macromedia® Flash® files, movies, music files, plug-ins, or other special content.
As sophisticated as SiteSpinner™ objects are, they are wonderfully easy to work with. The simplest way to add an object to a page is to click its associated button in the Components Bar. If you’re adding a shape or vector drawing, you can begin drawing on the page right away. If you’re adding text, a title, an image, or a foreign object, just let SiteSpinner™ guide you. Then save your work, and the object will be inserted on the page. You can move or transform objects with your mouse pointer right there in the Work Window, or you can use their associated editors to edit them more precisely.
In this chapter, you’ll learn all about objects – including what they are and all of the many ways you can use them to quickly and easily build your web site.