Blinksale: Easy, painless, online invoicing for small businesses

Web Designers: Need some suggestions for web site navigation! :)

greetings!

i'm in the process of designing a personal web page. coming from an OOP background, i like reusing things when possible. so, when i notice i have the same code in all my web pages for my nav menu, i get a little irritated...

so what i'm wondering is: what's a good, preferably non-JavaScript, way of coding a persistent nav menu?

i found a few tutorials involving CSS, but they all warn about issues with cross-browser compatibility. the wise and venerable anti suggested using PHP, which i'm not against, although that would require learning yet another new language...

thanks in advance!!!

:)

Posted by louiemctool on Sep 20, 2007 in Blab | 8 comments

daia on Sep 20, 2007

i'd go with anti and say php is the best way.. it really doesn't require any new language skills, i've gone pretty far on my copy/paste skills ;)
Basic example.

VINZ on Sep 20, 2007

Take a look at listamatic, all css based :

danielsemper on Sep 20, 2007

CSS Menu all the way U_U

louiemctool on Sep 20, 2007

so the prevailing opinion is to use CSS? hmm...

:)

gswd on Sep 20, 2007

I'm actually going to go out on a limb, and ask what you mean by "persistent"?

By my understanding of the definition, then yes, CSS is a very good way to go, and there is an excellent podcast that shows how to do it easily using Dreamweaver. (podcast blog archive)

louiemctool on Sep 20, 2007

by "persistent," i mean that i want to have the same menu in every page, and to have the menu retain whatever "buttons" have been clicked, especially if i go with some sort of cascading menu structure (haven't decided on that one yet...)

i don't use dreamweaver. i'm coding everything by hand, although i am using visual studio (i like the code completion and syntax highlighting. i don't use the WYSIWYG part of it...)

:)

katylava on Sep 20, 2007

PHP is easy... especially for something as simple as that. For someone who already knows a programming language, you could build something solid with just a day or two of studying. The worst part about going from one language to another is having to look everything up. I like to get a book on whatever new language I want to learn and skim through it before I start coding. That way I at least know *what* to look up later... even if I don't remember exactly how to use it.

gswd on Sep 20, 2007

Ok. Then really CSS might not be the best for you. I have done menus like what you are talking about in XHTML/CSS (but I had to code the menu into each page not update friendly), but have since used SHTML and PHP because of the ability to use variables and includes.

CSS is still a part of it because of the ability to adjust appearances easily with a "class" feature.

I also hand code the HTML/CSS of my sites, however, I do like using Dreamweaver as my tool, since I do not have to worry about hidden characters.