About hotspots and image maps

As a designer you can use hotspots and image map, to make navigation easier. "A hotspot" is an area of a graphic that is linked to a URL. "An image map" is a graphic with several hotspots which have been placed on it.

Creating hotspot using hotspot tools

1. Choose your rectangular, circular, or polygon hotspot tool, the image below shows all the hotspot tools options.

2. Drag the hotspot tool to draw a hotspot over an area of your graphic, as shown below. I have a rectangle and I put my text on top of it and with rectangular hotspot tool I have drawn my hotspot around my text.

Note: If you are using polygon hotspot tool, you have to click to place vector points, and whether your path is open or close, the area is going to be defined as hotspot.

To assign a URL to a selected hotspot

1. Choose window > object panel, the object panel looks like the image below.

2. Enter your URL in the link text box, as shown above.
3. You can also enter an alt tag text (optional), also you can select a frame name from the target, in the above image I choose "self". You can also choose a different hotspot color from the pop-up color window.

Creating Slices

There are two ways to do slicing in FireWorks. You can automatically insert a rectangular slice over the object or you can draw a slice.

To insert a rectangular slice based on an object

1. Select your object, you can select more than one object by holding down the shift while selecting.
2. Choose > insert > slice

To draw a rectangular slice object

1. Select the slice tool
2. Drag to draw the slice object.

Exporting image maps

1. Optimize your graphic.
2. Choose > file > export.
3. Find the folder where you want to place the HTML file, and name it.
4. For save as, choose HTML and images.
5. For slices, choose none.
6. Click the save button to export the image map.