Thoughts on website design

[Alanmelon]

Just wondered if you knowledgable lot could give your advice/opinions on page design with regard to the following.
I'm learning a bit more about page design, and in particular Dreamweaver. In the past I've made a lot of use of frames, especially 'Inline' frames as Frontpage calls them, nested within tables. I find this quite versatile from a design perspective, but wondered how this technique sits from a technical point of view.
Dreamweaver seems not to support Inline frames, so I just wondered what methods others use. Frames seem to be the way to go as I don't want to have to change every page on my site when updating something, but the basic framesets Dreamweaver produces don't sit too well with tables.

I know this is a vast area, but any advice?

[TimmyB]

I'm not personally a big fan of frames, mainly because of the problem with people / search engines linking to an individual frame, rather than a frameset, hence the need for framebusting javascript etc.

If your hosting supports ASP or PHP etc you can achieve similar things with include files, i.e. menu bars and other content to be the same on numerous pages.

[Steve H]

I used to be very interested in web design/programming at one point.. but never followed this up.

The way I always did it, was to use Paint first off to design an image of how I wanted the site to look.. Pretty much a complete first page site design (Homepage), with text, images etc to see how everything looked (Obviousley wouldn't be working, since it's only a image)

I'd then print that off, and go into Fireworks and re-make the whole site making any improvements, and making sure this image is exactly how the site will look. I'd then slice the site up, using the Cut and Slice tools in Fireworks, into manageable bits.

IE - Left menu would be sliced up onto its own, top Banner would be sliced, Center Content Area would be sliced, Bottom Copyright part sliced, and any other bits.

Would then take this over to dreamweaver, and place these 'images', in as background tables, and use tables over the top to place text onto this.. Thats in theory anyway!..

Mean's you can update certain parts of your site by editing one bit, For example, the Left part could be your menu, and You'd edit 'left.html', which would then alter it on every page.

I only really designed a few sites, and one of my mates did the rest for me, so cant give much help on the html side of things (was acutally asp on most of my sites)

An example - www.bos-squad.co.uk The left side of it updates when you change the left.asp file..

[Alanmelon]

I tried tinkering with ASP and PHP but couldn't work it out, and got angry May have to revisit it then.

[TimmyB]

Originally Posted by Alanmelon

I tried tinkering with ASP and PHP but couldn't work it out, and got angry May have to revisit it then.

LOL - yeah, I remember my first attempts at doing database driven stuff, it can be frustrating when you are new to it.

Include files are a very simple thing to do (I think that's what Steve H is describing when he talks about the left.asp file). You have your main asp file for the page, then at a point in the html for that page you put a statement telling the server to include another asp file (which although it has an asp extension can be pure html, not a fully structured html page with a header, body etc as you would with frames - but just an html element - say a table). So although a page can exist as seperate source files on the server - all the outside world ever sees is one single page.

You do have to be a little careful that the end result is a syntactically valid page - worth running through an html validator. Dreamweaver supports include files in as much as it will display the complete page with all the includes, but if you want to edit the contents of one of the includes - you need to swap to editing that file, not the overall page.

http://www.w3schools.com/ is a good site for learning about web scripting.

[Halcyon]

Frames can cause problems and whilst they might look good in a particular browser they may make your site look terrible in another browser.
Your best bet is using tables and splitting them up into rows and columns and define a structure for how you want your page to look.

The best way is to actually design your website in something like Photoshop and then put it together in Dreamweaver.

Good luck.

[Alanmelon]

Thanks for the comments so far. So, without using frames, what would be the best way to create navigation for my site, without having to replace every page if I want to add a new link/page?

[mart44]

Originally Posted by Halcyon

Frames can cause problems and whilst they might look good in a particular browser they may make your site look terrible in another browser.

This is true. When constructing a website I think it's best to have a few popular browsers installed and keep checking the pages in them. I Generally found that if pages looked right in Opera they would look OK in Netscape and IE too. This also applies to a non-frames construction.

Also, it needs to be decided whether to construct the site with the tables written in pixels or percentages. If table widths are in pixels the width of the page stays fixed no matter what the screen resolution. If written in percentages, the page contents expand or contract to fit the various screen resolutions (like the pages in this site do).

Sites that have tables in pixels are often constructed for a screen resolution of 800 x 600. This means they have gaps at the sides of the tables on the screen on resolutions higher than that.

[Richard M]

Originally Posted by Alanmelon

Thanks for the comments so far. So, without using frames, what would be the best way to create navigation for my site, without having to replace every page if I want to add a new link/page?

You could do it server side, with PHP:

PHP Code:

<?php
include_once ('menu.php');
?>

or client-side:

<script type="text/javascript" src="menu.js"></script>

or even:

<script type="text/javascript" src="menu.html"></script>

I noticed that a few people are mentioning tables in this thread.
IMO, they are so outdated these days - they're meant for displaying tabular data, not for layout.

[Alanmelon]

Sorry, am quite new to these concepts. Could you elaborate a little on the above?

[mart44]

I noticed that a few people are mentioning tables in this thread.
IMO, they are so outdated these days - they're meant for displaying tabular data, not for layout.

I dunno ...put to good effect they can work OK.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/boots44/artset.html

[Tricky]

Frames can also confuse those little robots that pop around to index your site for you.