Flash is sleek and dynamic which allows your client’s customers new ways to interact with their web sites. Below you will find a “slider” navigation component, that can be customized with different pictures, links, text and font colors.

The navigation is considered stateful because it knows which state it should be in for a given page. You will notice that whichever page you are on, that page’s image is displayed in the middle of the slider, no matter where the image was when you left the last page. This makes sense, because often users wonder “Where am I?” on a site, which is why breadcrumbs, were created, and that is why links in some navigations are different colors for the current page.

The blog theme I am using isn’t very flexible, so please click to open in a new window and see this navigation as it could look on one of your client’s sites.

The navigation above can be configured by modifying a text file that configures the navigation item’s image, the item’s url, the caption and within the caption, the text colors. A snippet of the configuration text follows:

<items>
<item>
<imageURL>images/cliffTree.jpg</imageURL>
<itemId>cliffTree.html</itemId>
<headerCaption><![CDATA[<font color="#431F81"><b>Cliff Tree</b></font><font color="#000000"> - Number One</font>]]></headerCaption>
</item>
<item>
<imageURL>images/desert.jpg</imageURL>
<itemId>desert.html</itemId>
<headerCaption><![CDATA[<font color="#431F81"><b>Desert</b></font><font color="#000000"> - Number Two</font>]]></headerCaption>
</item>
<item>
<imageURL>images/forest.jpg</imageURL>
<itemId>forest.html</itemId>
<headerCaption><![CDATA[<font color="#431F81"><b>Forest</b></font><font color="#000000"> - Number Three</font>]]></headerCaption>
</item>

The configuration file is simple enough that someone who doesn’t know Flash should be able to modify the navigation to their liking. With some new images and a couple of tweaks to the configuration, you could turn this navigation into completely new looking navigation.