Adrian,

Just for your information:  I and also a lot of other users are not very happy with sounds on webpages. And more so if you can't control them.

Think about what your users want, and make not a webpage to show  people what you can do with a website.....

It's just MHU ..... so be carefull and think about your visitors!

If you set this code in an html object then it will play once during load:

<embed name="myMusic" loop="false" hidden="true" src="BOMB.WAV"></embed>

I suggest to use wav files or ogg (else firefox will not play and maybe other browsers as well.)

set the file manually in the root of the website.

Andre,

I wrote you a longish post but when I submitted it, the whole thing vanished! Most frustrating.

The question was about how to change the row height when Flash objects. Although the object itself does not seem to allow for that, I think I may have stumbled on the solution. In the template structure you can specify the minimum cell height for page contents. I have now set that to 10 so we will see if that does the trick.

I took your advice and added an HTML object and then referenced the swf file externally. That seems to work and as the swf height is only 1 px as well as being transparent, it adds nothing to the cell height.

In respect of your sentiments concerning sound in web sites, I have to agree however, this is a very particular case because the site sells a fart prank so its target audience is people looking to laugh and have fun. The sound FX are in fact a series of different farts timed in a way so that they catch the visitor by surprise.

This has various effects:
1. It generally makes the visitor laugh.
2. It makes anyone close by curious so they ask what he is doing or looking at.
3. It sometimes results in the visitor sending his friends a link to the site so he can get their reaction to both the fart sounds and the site content which, if you speak French, will definitely get you laughing.

I ran this site for a year without the sound FX and for a year with. Sales definitely increased since I have been using the FX.

I actually witnessed the effect they had when one day I had to phone tech support at my hosting service. The technician pulled up my site which began farting at him after around 20 seconds. He began laughing, but more importantly a few of his colleagues asked what he was up to and came over to look at the site.

Before the end of that day I received 2 orders from Germany. Given that the site is all in French and my host is based in Germany, it was clear to me that these orders came from techs working there.

I repeat, this case is very particular due to the type of product being proposed and the target audience. Anyone else reading this should NOT get the idea that sound FX are a panacea for getting sales. In most cases they will annoy the visitor and could make him leave the site. As an example, imagine you had a site about Labrador dogs. No matter how carefully you timed the FX, if your site began barking like a Labrador it wouldn't even make your visitor smile.

Another thing to consider is overkill.

My site has 5 erratically timed farts that stop after they have played once. They appear only on the home page. If it happened on all pages the effect would be lost and rather than being a source of laughter they would become a source of annoyance.

I even considered adding a script to cookie the visitor's browser so that he would never hear them again but I considered that he may want to show the site to friends at some time and he wouldn't be so happy if the sounds were no longer there.

One trouble with using Flash is that it will not play on iPhones or in browsers where the user has deactivated ActiveX but in this case I can live with that.

Adrian,

No problem at all, Claudio also suggest a html object, else, is code inside the page through the expert section a solution for sound during loading. But try this first.

And if you do it for a special reason or then no problem at all. It can sometimes be a nice feature. So I understand that.

Let me know if there are still issues.

Best regards,

Andre

Thanks go to both Andre and Claudio. The HTML object was a good workaround however, the experience has highlighted the fact that the Flash object cannot have its row height or width controlled and it is not the only object that is missing this functionality.

IMHO, ALL objects should be configurable so that they can fit with the site design rather than wrecking it.

I have said it before but I believe it is worth repeating, no such issues existed in FrontPage 98, one of the earliest examples of a WYSIWYG site editor, and it had loads of options that are not found in X5. I like X5 and find it easy to learn and fun to work with but I do feel that it has a long way to go before it can be considered as a genuinely professional tool for building sites with.

What's your view guys?

Hello Adrian,

Generally the flash object is used for animations and a mimum size used for animations is at least 50px more or less.

The program is trying with every version to abandon flash technology and use html5 so it will be supported on every device without the need of plugins.

In past flash was used widely and it was common to focus on it's functionalities but since now most don't have the plugin installed or it's not supported on the device they use it become more and more marginal.

Frontpage was more a WYSIWYG than a what is WebSite X5. On WebSite X5 there's no need to have coding skills and and it allows you to freely compose the page without having to worry about the code to be correct.

Many thanks!