Flash, of course, is the most widely used program for creating high quality animations for the web.  If you've seen really cool looking, large animations with music and links and buttons and more, it was probably produced with Flash or one of the Flash compatible authoring programs

Web Studio will enable you to easily add any Flash compatible file (.swf files) to your pages. 

Adding Flash Animations to your web pages

The easiest way to add a Flash file is to open Web Studio to the page you want to add the Flash to and then drag the file from Windows directly onto the page. That's it! Web Studio will then create a Flash object on your page containing the animation.

Other ways to add animations are via the Insert menu, and dragging one from the MultiMedia gallery and by adding them to the MultiMedia gallery and then dragging them onto the page.

Once on your page you'll notice that the Flash object is the same size as the original animation and you'll see the Flash object placeholder graphic in the object. This is so you can easily identify your Flash objects.

Designing Pages that have Flash Animations

Flash animations are usually a very important part of the overall design of a web page.  Since this is so, Web Studio gives you the ability to play the animation in the Web Studio editor and freeze it at any point in the animation. This allows you to align other objects on your page to the overall animation or to individual elements in the animation. A very cool feature!

To play the animation in the editor just double click on it. It will start to play. To stop the animation click on the page's background or onto any other object. The animation stops at that point and displays that frame as the new placeholder graphic. You can now visually align it with other objects as necessary.

You can double click on it at any time to replay the animation.

Acquiring Flash Animations

Where can you get Flash Animations for your site? Search online for Flash Animations and you'll find lots of places.

Creating Your Own Flash Animations

What programs can you use to create your own? Unfortunately, Web Studio doesn't create them...yet. However, many of our customers have found the Swish program to be excellent, others have used Coffee Cup's Flash animation program. There are many others available, some that specialize in making various web components such as buttons, as opposed to the generalized programs that can make anything but are more complex.

...there is an Automatic Backup feature in 4.0? Go to the Web Site menu and choose Website Properties. At the bottom of the dialog you can choose a location and name for you backup. 

...you can add unique meta tags to individual pages? Go to the Page Menu and choose Page Properties and click on the Page Meta Tags tab. This enables you to add meta tags that are specific to each page of your site.

..there is a new menu for the PageList? Just click the PageList button. It enables you to do many things that were relatively hidden in previous versions, like Renaming Pages, setting the Home Page; and has new features like Close All and Move Up and Move Down. 

...you can specify what to put in the CoolStuff Links? Just click on the PageList menu and check or un-check the Include in CoolStuff menu item.  By default all pages are included in the CoolStuff links. Go to each page you want to eliminate from the links and uncheck it.

...you can specify the order of links in CoolStuff Links? You do this by re-ordering the pages in the PageList. To move a page in the list, click on its name and then choose MoveUp (or MoveDown) from the PageList menu. You can also move pages up and down very quickly by clicking on it name and then pressing the ALT-PageUp or ALT-PageDown keys. And if you press and hold the keys you'll see the names zoom up or down the PageList.

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Here's our third newsletter this year. We've got some good news to report and some great tips on using Web Studio 4.0 as usual. 

In our last issue we announced that the online Content Gallery was 4.0 compatible. If you missed it, click here to visit the Content Gallery.

However, you may not want to download all of that content, so, read the What's New Online column below and you'll see our new 4.0 CD is now available and contains all of the content in the online collection! The entire collection can be installed into 4.0 in one shot! It can be used with 3.01 as well!

Also, don't overlook the new Web Studio 4.0 Printed Documentation. It is also available as a bundle with the CD for those of you who want both at a discount.

Steve Cochard
President
Back to the Beach Software, LLC

• Web Studio 4.0 Retail
• Web Studio 4.0 Upgrade from 3.0
• Web Studio 4.0 Upgrade from 2.0
• Web Studio 4.0 30-Day Free Trial, and...
• The Web Studio 4.0 Complete Content Collection

The complete content collection from our website contains 10's of thousands of art including backgrounds, buttons, signs, animations, clipart, photos. 

Once you have 4.0 installed, just run the CD and choose to install the Content Collection and it will install all of the content in the appropriate galleries in your Web Studio automatically. 

What you'll see next time you use Web Studio is a bunch of new items in your galleries with little yellow folders on their upper left corner. Double click on these folders to see the new collections.

The Web Studio 4.0 CD is available here.

It is 242 pages long, has an exceptionally detailed table of contents, and documents virtually every thing you can do with Web Studio 4.0. 

This is in contrast with previous documentation for versions 1 thru 3. By reviewing our tech support phone calls and emails and posts on our forum we found there were many, many features that people didn't even know about. In addition, there were many techniques that people didn't know as well. 

We considered that input and rewrote almost all of the old documentation, and added  18 new chapters that explain everything that you can do with every object in Web Studio as well as how to do it. 

For example, there is a chapter titled Working With The Galleries that tells you everything you can do with the galleries. Most of which you probably don't know. A chapter on Basic Web Site Concepts tells describes all of the services required to have a site as well as the pieces of a site, like the home page, domain names, hosting and more.

And, there is the first ever documentation of the HTML Object, Page HTML, and Object HTML features. These features can be used by advanced users to expand the capabilities of Web Studio beyond its already robust set of features.

We're really happy with the new documentation and thankful to all those who contributed input on how to make it better.

If you'd like to purchase both the CD and the documentation, we have a special price for the "Bundle".

The Web Studio Printed Documentation is available here.

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