Operation Manual

Working with Graphics, Animation, and Multimedia 69
One way of including multimedia is to add a hyperlink or hotspot (see
the next chapter) that opens a specific media file. With this option, the
media file remains separate from the site. WebPlus also provides
several ways of embedding the source file.
Clicking the
Insert Sound Clip or Insert Video Clip button
on the Tools toolbar’s Web Objects flyout lets you choose whether to
link the clip from a standard icon (supplied by WebPlus), from an
external picture file of your choice, or via an inline media “player”
(again supplied by WebPlus). With the third option, a marker appears
on your page where the player will be shown after the page is
published. Using any of these approaches, you can select or deselect the
Embed option.
When you publish your site, WebPlus takes care of exporting and
copying both embedded and non-embedded files. Note that you won’t
be able to play back or edit sound or video files in WebPlus; you’ll
need to use an external media editor.
Design tips
Graphics
You can obtain pictorial content in lots of ways: scanning, grabbing
screen images, using clip art, creating from scratch. No matter where
you get an image, you’ll need to modify it in some way: cropping or
enhancing it, adding text, applying a special effect, combining it with
another image. For these tasks, you don’t have to be a great artist, but
you do need to know your way around a paint program like Serif
PhotoPlus. Make sure you’ve got a package that can save to the .GIF
format. Whichever program you’re using, the information and advice in
this section will help you use it effectively with WebPlus.
Before moving on to some more technical aspects of enhancing Web
graphics, let’s review a few visual design precepts with special
relevance for Web pages in general. As in other sections of this chapter,
we’re interested in respecting the way people actually experience Web
pages.
♦ If you’re using graphics as page elements, not just as background,
then use small, significant elements throughout the page, not just at
the top and bottom. As users scroll, the page should preserve a
balance of text, graphics, and white (background) space.