I am using the Coffee Cup Flash Menu Builder to to create a menu for my VSD site. I am fairly stupid about these things so forgive me. The Menu Builder asks for the URL of the webpage to link to. Can someone tell me how to see the URL of each of my webpages in VSD? I don't see anywhere that displays the info. It has not been published yet as I am still building it. Again thanks for putting up with me ignorance.

Poolman,

getting your URL addresses is actually fairly simple.

your home address will be www.yoursite.com

the pages you create in VSD will ask for a page name (i.e. contact, about us, services, etc.)

Depending on the name you give the page, you will produce that pages' address according to your homepage.

Example:

www.yoursite.com/services would be the URL address for a page called "services" that you create in VSD.

You would use this URL to create the link within Flash Menu Builder

Since the website pages are in the root folder of the website itself, I simply put "pagename.html" in the URL address, and it seems to work fine for me that way. Unless you are linking outside of the root area of the site, this seems to be fine... but... Is that a bad practice?

It seems to me if you put "www.mywebpage.com/webpage" as the URL, you wont be able to test it in VSD, right? Since the link points to what might be a nonexisting site if you havent actually done the upload to the host server. By putting the full URL in the field, wouldnt you have to upload the site before being able to test the link (I think).

Am even more of a noob than I think?

Thank you AE Designs and Scott for your help. Yes, I am a poolman and not a computer man so I am stupid about these things as I said. So, from what you are saying, the program will automatically name the page according to my main URL and then add the forward slash and then whatever name I give to that page? Is that correct? So I guess you can not visually see that info anywhere until you publish?

Fear not, the majority of us do not have a career in this either. I do believe I did as Scott said and only put in the filename w/o the path, with the assumption the links would all be relative to the menu's files. I'm sure you can either way, I'm just lazy. The preview in VSD won't give the final look of the paths as if you had it online (like www.site.com/page.html), so I always recommend uploading to see the real deal, although I'd understand most people don't want a work-in-progress online for all to see. I'll still throw one of these ancient puppies on a site:
http://www.coffeecuphelp.com/adam/images/ucon.gif

Wow, I love that people actually help here! My next newb question on the Flash Menu Builder is that I notice that there is no way to adjust the actual height or width of the menu you will create. Will the HTML box that I create on the homepage determine the actual size? In other words, will the menu automatically fill the size space I create with the HTML tool?

Also, a few of my menu buttons text is not fitting in the button unless I decrease the font size. If I do not decrease the font size will the button text display correctly when the actual menu is created in the HTML box? Or do I indeed have to shrink the text size down for it to dispaly correctly?

I think you found the two biggies that I desperately think need improvement. As far as I can tell, if the text gets cut off, it needs to be smaller. I also don't see a way to change the size of the menu within the program. It may be possible to doing some manual rigging in the XML that's generated (in Wordpad or Notepad) when saving the project. It's been a while since I tried messing with it and my memory is awful, so I'll have to revisit my testing when I get a chance. I'll be sure to pass along an elbow nudge requesting some updating of Flash Menu Builder. I know the CC crew's busy with several other apps (new and old), so we can only hope they find some time (thank goodness for free lifetime upgrades, as long as it doesn't take a lifetime).

Thanks Adam, It seems to me like it should adjust to the size, but what do I know! I guess I will find out. Thanks.

OK, Im still new at this, but I have found the following, and there has been a little discussion in other places recently too.

The Flash Menu is not sizable directly. It somehow calculates its size based on the size of the buttons. I needed a larger font in mine, so I created new larger (wider) buttons, and presto, the menu adapted. It was confirmed in an another post that the Flash Menu does adjust based on button size.

So to get more room for more or larger text on your buttons, you will need to create wider buttons.

How would one go about creating larger buttons?

Also, I started playing with the DHTML Menu Builder and on that one you can increase the width of the menu but you can not input custom color coordinates like you can in Flash Menu Builder.Ridiculous! I think CC needs to combine the elements of the two into one very usable program. Seems kinda of odd to have two programs that create the same thing but neither one stands on it's own as a solid program. Listening?