Creating Web Pages For Dummies®

Chapter 17. Adding Animation and Multimedia

In This Chapter

• Using multimedia in your Web pages

• Adding animated GIFs to your pages

• Adding video to your pages

• Adding QuickTime and MP3 files

Animation is a lot of fun — and it works well on the Web today because animation technology is so readily available to beginning Web page creators. Simple animations, called animated GIFs, are easy to find, and you can put them on your Web site for free. If you're not interested in using someone else's creations on your Web page, it's not that much harder to create your own.

But there's more than just animation. You can incorporate audio, video, and other multimedia technology into your Web page design. This chapter introduces you to your multimedia options and gives you a heads‐up on some of the technological and legal pitfalls you face as you utilize these incredible innovations.

Getting your page right by using the basic Web ingredients of text and graphics is a real challenge but a lot of fun. Get the Web publishing basics down before you push forward into the realm of multimedia. You can run into some problems when using multimedia, as described in the next section, but if you're adventurous, you can use the information that follows to add exciting multimedia flavorings to your Web pages.

Understanding Multimedia Pitfalls

Multimedia is something of a many‐headed beast. Audio works fairly well on the Web today. Animated GIFs are readily available and easy to incorporate in your Web page, as are audio ...