I need some help with GoLive CS2!

[cwright]

Hi everyone,
I'm planning on recreating my website (url in signature) in GoLive and I'm having some problems... The site was originally built in Dreamweaver (an old version a long time ago).

It badly needs to be redone because it is currently built only as images, even the text! I am an amateur at web design at most, and I can only build them visually-I don't know HTML code at all. I'm looking into GoLive because it appears to be easier to work with as far as layers go. I've found that it can add a transparent text layer over an image, which I couldnt do in Dreamweaver (at least I couldn't figure out how).

Anyway, I can't figure out how to do rollovers in GoLive. When I built the site originally, I would create all the rollover states in Photoshop and import that file into ImageReady which let me set the rollover states for each button, save a GIF file, and drop that into Dreamweaver.

I'm trying to figure out if I can now do the rollover states directly in GoLive, since it is integrated with ImageReady. When I import my layered PSD file into GoLive and add it to my HTML page, it seems to work fine: It recognizes all the slices and lets me select them individually. However, when I go to the Rollover palette menu, it says "Sliced Smart Objects cannot be modified using the rollover menu". Why?? It doesn't make sense.

Can someone please tell me if this is even possible? Going through ImageReady was such a pain before, and I want to streamline the process as much as possible, as I have lots of rollover buttons to create.

Thanks!

 

[frankblundt]

hmm. AFAIK, although GoLive will let you import layered/sliced PS files, it just generates the slices for you, based on what it looked like when you saved it, and saves them all as individual images and generates a table layout to stick them together on the page. It doesn't include alternate layer info (like rollover states) and so can't cope with adding rollovers. The "smart" objects aren't really that smart - just a link to the source file and settings to tell it how to cut them up and re-generate the images when the source file is changed.

You have two options.
One is ImageReady, using the layered PS file, to build the rollover options and export all the necessary variations of the images as individual images and all the code to make it work. Although it's a pain, it's probably still the easiest way.

Otherwise, in GoLive, it's a bit more manual. You save each of the rollover states from your PS file individually using Save for Web - all slices, HTML and Images - into separate folders for each state. Then you can open the "unrolled" version of the page, click on each of the slices that you want to make rollovers and using the rollover menu, point each of the states for that slice to the same slice in the appropriate folder for that state.

It's not straightforward whichever way you choose, and the code Adobe produces by either method is clumsy, enormous and plain fugly.

There are far simpler and much cleaner ways of doing it, a million examples of which can be found on Javascript tutorial sites but they all require at least a little knowledge of HTML, although really only enough to know where to cut and paste the example code into the page and to find the bits you need to change to make it work with your images. Personally, I found it easier this way than trying to work out the mysteries of Adobe.

 

[CDOG]

Golive

Well, I'm definitely not an expert on web development, so this post might be like financial advise from a crack head.

Golive definitely writes some shaky code and CS2 crashes more than CS did. Hopefully, the acquisition of Macromedia will create a hybrid vigor in CS3.

Tips:

Make sure you build everything in a site file or Golive will keep rewriting your code to find your Javascript library on your desktop. This makes everything look great on your computer, but like a bunch of broken links on everyone elses.

As far as Photoshop/Imageready to GoLive...I've used it to slice up a site design into tables. But I added the rollovers manually (it didn't import smart objects. Just regular image objects). I suppose you could export the site twice. Once with the images normal and another for the rollovers.

You could also try using the action palette instead of the rollover palette. Set Image URL on mouse enter and exit will create rollovers, but it is a little tedious.

That's all I've got.