I need some (make that lots of) help with buttons

Question

Hi,
I am a new designer and I am working on my first web site for free. It started out as something I was capable of doing but it has now expanded into a site that is challenging for me. Anyway, I am having a lot of confusion with with making flash navigation buttons for the site.
This is what the person wants.  In the up state he wants the button label in text only. In the over state he wants the text with a gray line behind it that slowly expands onto the page. In the down state he wants the same thing but have the text color change and the line color to change. This line is also suppose to stay on the page until the user moves the mouse again. Ultimately the line should also stay fully extended for a sub-menu.
This is what I have done. I have been using action script 2 so I can use the behaviors panel. I made two different movie clips, one gray and one white, using shape tweens to slowly expand the lines.
I started out with the lable only and turned it into a button. It showed in the "up" section of the time line and I put a fram in the "hit" section (layer 1).
Next I inserted a new layer (layer 2) and put a keyframe in the over section of the timeline and made a gray box for behind the text and attached my gray movie clip to the end of it. I put layer 1 above layer 2 so that the text would show through. I did basically the same thing for layer 3 in the "down" section
except changed the colors to black and put a keyframe in layer 1 to change the text color.
Now this is what I get when I play the movie in flash. I have a button that the "hand" appears in only one very small section of it below the text. It does not appear when I hover over the text. When I "hit" the line keeps repeating the movie. I know this is a behavior but when I use the behavior panel to put in play and stop it shows the event as none. As for my black line in the down section, it plays so fast that it might as well not be there. How on earth do I stop it and get it to remain on the page? I also should tell you that I know very little about action script just in case that is the direction that I need to go.
Thanks

Answer 1

You'll probably have to spend some time learning how to create buttons and movieclips that do what you want, which is what you are in the thick of at the moment.  For the small area you say reacts to the mouse, the Hit frame is used to define the area that you want to be reactive... so if you had a tiny dot in the normal frames, you could add a big dot in the Hit frame to make it easier to get the mouse to work with the button... the Hit frame content does not display.
For the movieclips, you need to add stop(); commands at the end of their timeines if you don't want them to loop.
Another approach you might consider is to create your buttons as movieclips rather than as button symbols.  Going this route gives you much more control of how things behave, but does involve some actionscript to make them behave as if they were buttons for the various states. Some people do not use button symbols and will only use movieclip versions of them.