HTML Forum

**greenguy** · 05-30-2007, 12:23 AM

Hi Everyone. I joined this forum because I am new to webdesign. I am an artistic person and full of ideas. I've also noticed lots of threads by ladynred, and she seems very smart.

I started taking online tutorials at http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp 3 months ago. I know my website sucks. I am going to take some online courses in design from my local tech college in August in CSS and design.

What I need help with right now is how to make an efficient navigation bar on my website.

I tried making a horizontal navigation bar on some portions of my site
sample: http://www.midwestsecondhandstyle.com/index.html

I also tried to make a vertical navigation bar on my "go green" page
http://www.midwestsecondhandstyle.co...servation.html

Both of them look sloppy and outdated.

how can I add pages without updating 25 navigation bars? I read on googles forum that I can name my first page main, and my navigation page, nav main. That way I don't need to update so many pages.

I'm confused because my first page needs to be named index.html on lunarpages. I feel like this is a big, long, unsolved algebra problem.

Please help me!?

**ADAM Web Design** · 05-30-2007, 12:55 AM

I'm not LadyNRed (I'm uglier and far less intelligent), but I think I can help you anyway...

http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic/ <--- this will give you almost every possible way to do a navigation bar, including 100 you and I haven't ever thought of before.

As far as naming pages goes, the good news is that your host, Lunarpages, supports a technology called server side includes (or SSI for short). Instead of calling your pages .html, you call them .shtml . Your host still should be able to recognize index.shtml as your default file, although you may need to delete the index.html file off your server first (this depends on the order in which hosts recognize default pages.)

To use a server-side include, check out this tutorial: http://www.smartwebby.com/web_site_d...e_includes.asp . The simplified explanation is that you add an  tag and it merges the include file with your page file to create one HTML file. Browsers, search engine spiders, and people can't tell which portion is the header, which is the footer, and which is the body just from looking at the code (unless you use comment tags within your include files to indicate as such). It's one big page of HTML goodness.

Pretty cool, eh?

**Angelosanto** · 05-30-2007, 08:42 AM

Thanks for those two links, they were excellent

**LadynRed** · 05-30-2007, 11:18 AM

Quote:

(I'm uglier and far less intelligent)

LOL - now Adam.. I haven't seen your mug, but I KNOW you're definitely NOT 'far less intelligent'

Anyway, I don't need to say much more, Adam covered it all

There is one link I can offer, with TONS of CSS menu offerings:
http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/index.html

**jason_bristol** · 03:14 PM

I'm with lunar pages and I didn't know that about what Adam said. I'll have to have a look into that :-). Anyway another way to do it is to add a very simple php script into your page.

HTML Code:

<?php
   include('pagehere.php')
?>

and you can insert snippets of text/code/whatever mulipule times. You need to call the page yourpage.php and your must have chosen the non-windows server. the linux server.

**greenguy** · 05-30-2007, 02:44 PM

I've been looking at these links. There is so much information. I have to process this for a bit. Each time I re-read the info, I understand a little more.