I’ve just finished looking at the new Layer Genie extension by Marja Ribbers and George Petrov. I spent hours creating the layered menu on my site, www.ebconcepts.com, and found creating the nested flyout menu a formidable task with countless revisions of source code to achieve cross browser compatibility. Not so with Layer Genie! This handy tool is the answer to quickly and easily creating custom layer effects of all kinds. In fact, it’s so good I don’t know whether to praise or denounce the DMX Zone team for coming up with an extension that makes it so easy. Now anyone can create a custom cascading layers menu like mine in a matter of minutes and never look at the source code! Now what will I do to impress?

I started developing web sites way back in '95. This makes me about 500 years old in the business. I remember when Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4 came out. There were all these cool transitions you can apply to DHTML Layers. The only challenge was that the transitions did not work with any other web browser.

It is now many years later and each web browser, Netscape, IE and Opera, support DHMTL Transitions is one format or another. The problem now is that many of the browsers handle transitions differently. This makes for a lot of JavaScript and CSS code.

Now, with the release of Layer Genie I have a very easy tool that does this for me. Layer Genie sits in the Behaviors Panel and works and operates exactly like any standard Behavior. All you have to do is place a DHTML Layer onto the page, add your content and apply whichever effect you want. The effect can be a simple swipe transition, a fade in or a drop shadow.

You know how it is ... your client thinks they want 'a Flash site' - but they want to keep all that dynamic content - and they want it NOW! And you're holding your head in your hands as you try to explain the limitations, the cost and the time ...

Whereas nine times out of ten, all your client really needs is this extension and a little imagination to make their site eye-catching impressive, whilst keeping all the functionality and code you've worked so hard on.

What DXMZone have managed to do here is a piece together a number of equally impressive DHTML behaviours in one suite - all guaranteed to 'WOW' your client in a few seconds and save you a heap of time on the 'presentation' whilst you concentrate on the really important stuff!

As usual, installation is a breeze and the suite of behaviours are excellently signposted within Dreamweaver MX. Once up and running, you'll want to start playing - and there's a lot to play with in here! Just creating one simple layer with an image or text in and firing off the behaviour gives you a huge amount of options ... you can do a simple slide to anywhere from anywhere in any direction, make it unfold, hide, pop back up - in fact, you'll waste hours just messing around with the options and watching the results - I know I have!

Once up to speed with the basics, you'll realise how to group layers together to create cascading menu effects and others visually impressive tricks.

In fact, you'll be using this tool a lot for your menus - as you've got everything to create some beautiful cascading menus, which will definitely impress. For the more technically minded - how about creating your menus from a datasource and let Layer Genie to the rest with its effects!

Needless to say, I'm impressed. If you are a novice web developer looking to spice up your site, or working on many clients’ sites and needing to Wow them - quickly - I cannot recommend this enough. It will soon pay for itself...

Have fun

Spencer Steel

I am a total Dreamweaver novice, but thanks to extensions like this one, which has the user of all abilities considered in the design, helps me to create professional results. Layer Genie adds a wide range of effects to any page and does it without being over the top in terms of wistles and bells. Keeps it tasteful.

So, I end by saying that this is my most significant purchase aside from Dreamweaver itself.

Thanks