Web Design Tip Of The Month

[HHI Golf Guy]

In addition to adding content to their sites, most web site owners like to tinker with design changes or even add or delete entire sections of their web site. One problem that they encounter is having to redo the navigation structure of the web site.

For SEO purposes, you may want to change the anchor text on your menus. No matter the reason you are making changes, if you do not plan your site correctly you may have to manually change hundreds of pages or take your chances with a global edit.

On my sites the navigation menus, sub menus, and footers are the most frequently changed areas of a page. In order to save myself a ton of work when updating a site I use server side includes for my menus and footers. I even use an include to display featured properties throughout the web site.

This way, I need to make changes to only one file to update these sections of my web site!

[Phoenix Realtor]

Nice!

We have that for our footer at AA and I suggested they change our I-Frame (well, drop it completely) and make our Nav bar like our footers. How easy would that be!

[frobn]

In addition to adding content to their sites, most web site owners like to tinker with design changes or even add or delete entire sections of their web site. One problem that they encounter is having to redo the navigation structure of the web site.

For SEO purposes, you may want to change the anchor text on your menus. No matter the reason you are making changes, if you do not plan your site correctly you may have to manually change hundreds of pages or take your chances with a global edit.

On my sites the navigation menus, sub menus, and footers are the most frequently changed areas of a page. In order to save myself a ton of work when updating a site I use server side includes for my menus and footers. I even use an include to display featured properties throughout the web site.

This way, I need to make changes to only one file to update these sections of my web site!That is an excellent way to do it. If your server has php on it you can also use a php include. I also use css menus with the menu items as list items. That way they are all text and when I want to change an item I edit, add, or delete it from the list. There are several sites that have css menu makers, here is the best one I have found list-a-matic (http://www.accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/list-o-matic/list-o-matic.asp)

[Chief Tutor]

great reference site...I have been doing most of my nav bars on the left hand side so as to avoid using java script but finding a good CSS script which enables me to do a horizontal nav bar is great. This will allow for more space below the header to work with. I knew some good ones were out there, I just hadn't found them yet.

[Corey Bryant]

A couple of others can be Suckerfish Dropdowns (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/dropdowns) and Accessible Website Menu (http://www.udm4.com/)

The Brothercake menu is very easy to manipulate. And I usually put the list in an ASP include file so that I only have to change one file

[happy home]

Good stuff

[themedialion]

I used the menus from dhtmlcentral com on my www.realpinions.com (http://www.realpinions.com) website.

This was very easy to implement and modify and I'm using them within SSIs to every page gets wrapped with the same formatted menus.

[JuniperAvenue]

Great tip. Suckerfish is real nice IMHO.

[MarriedToRealEstate]

Has anyone ever heard of Spry? It's Adobe's free offering to AJAX, but they have some very neat widgets that come with it. One is a menubar widget that is pretty slick and very easy to update.

[spanishproperty]

That is now I have built all of my sites, by using a php include -

<?php
include 'leftnav.php';
?>

I do this with every page, the header, the footer, the navigation bar and anything that is repeated on other pages to reduce the amount of repeat editing that I need to do.

This is a good post, lots of people that have huge sites don't realise how much time can be saved....

It's like having a stylesheet or javascript file instead of having solely the script in each page separated in a different file.

Good post