Through another thread, I found out that Image Mapper will be a nice addition to VSD when creating my site. At this time next week I hope to have a pretty good understanding of how Image Mapper works (with a lot of help from you all), but for now I haven't a clue even where to start! Even the 'help' feature isn't a hep. It's like I'm looking at some foreign language.

I don't have ANY idea what it all means. I understand the concept of what Image Mapper does, but doing it? That's the horse of a different color. (that you've heard tell about)

So, I got my Image put on the mapper thingy and there I sit. I have NO clue what to do now. It's rather like I just woke up finding myself in a space suit sitting in the cockpit of the Space Shuttle waiting for launch. I look around at all this STUFF and haven't a clue what to do to get it off the ground.

Can anyone tell me where the "start the engine" button is? Thanks in advance. Bill

Alright, I've managed to achieve lift off.
Point of origin: The Earth. (www.theearth.org)
Destination: The Moon. (page 2 of theearth.org)
Target: Tranquility Base. (half way down page 2 of the earth.com)

What information would I put in each of these spaces?

AREA PROPERTIES:
Name__________
URL___________
Alt Text__________
Target: (from drop down)
Page Default
Same Frame
Whole Page
New Browser Window
Parent frame
Mouseover Text_________

MAP PROPERTIES:
Default URL___________
Default Target (from drop down)
(same as "Target" drop down)

Thanks for any info! Bill

I had no idea www.theearth.org was a real website!

Bill, you'd be amazed at some of the domain names registered That one though, (I'm speculating) seems to be held by a potential 'squatter', in hopes of maybe cashing in on it someday. Although it could be a valid owner, that is holding it until they have their content ready to publish.

Bill,

Please bear in mind I've not installed this software (yet), so I'm going by what I know about image mapping in general. Here's what I believe needs to go into each slot:



As you map out different areas on the main image each one needs some information in order to be useful. This field is simply a name you pick to identify a given area.



This is where you put the link you want the user to jump to when they click the area you've defined on the main image.



This is what you want the user to see for the area link in case their browser can't do graphics, or they're using sight-impaired software.



This is how you want the new link to pop up when the user clicks the area of the main image. You can probable leave it at Page Default.



This is what you want the user to see when their mouse cursor hovers over the area you're defining, but hasn't clicked.



This is where you want the user to go if they click anywhere on the main image that you haven't defined as an area. I think you can leave it blank if you want nothing to happen at all, but I'm not 100% on that.

Here's a link to some help pages about image mapping in general. I find it helps me figure out what a program needs if I understand what it's trying to do.

http://www.ihip.com/

Good luck!

Here's another good link:

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutorials/im … hp/3479741

Hi William,
has anybody showed you where you can see a tutorial of the image mapper?
http://www.coffeecup.com/image-mapper/

it would give you a good idea or starting point, the links are on the right hand side..

That was quite usful Spinny, thanks. That, and a lot of playing around with the program, I think I understand most of it.

What I still need to understand though is the URL. I'm confused as to what to put in the box asking what URL to use.

1. Since I don't have my site published (on the web) yet, I probably don't have a URL yet correct?
2. Is the URL the same for the WHOLE site or is there a different URL for EACH individual page? ie: I have 3 different sections of an image and each section takes you to a different page on the site. Am I using 3 different URL's? Likewise, if my website has 104 different pages to it, does that mean the site has 104 different URL's?
3. Who or what determines what the URL will be?

Thanks again.

William,

Each page on the internet has a specific URL.

http://www.yoursite.com is one URL.
http://www.yoursite.com/aboutus.html is another URL.

If you are planning to use a graphic to direct your site visitors to different locations on your site, you will assign a different URL for each location. The URLs I showed above are absolute locations, but you could use /aboutus.html as a relative URL.

hi william,
a URl is a website http://www,coffeecup.com or in your case to one of your pages (in VSD) it's pagename.htmlhttp://kellyinfo.com/crazy/284.gif
sorry BillR