Okay, I've been a member here for a while...on occasion I do a little bit of webby type work. I'm helping out with our chamber of commerce site (small town).

Basically the site consists of header, left hand nav, to the right of the left hand nav is the body, and a footer at the bottom.

As of right now we have an include for a portion of the left hand nav (so they can have additional little tid-bits like the weather) Under this is just some links and a little bit of info. Also the footer is an include as well as part of the header.

Here's what they want...when you click a link in the left hand nav it loads in the body without having to re-render the page. We really don't want to use frames...

The whole site is about 18 pages and they basically want each page to have links in the left hand nav and load on the fly without having to re-render the page.

How do you recommend going about doing this? What language does this require?

So we can use the include we're using .shmtl extensions for the file names. (severside includes). If that helps.

1/ load everything in one page and use show/hide "tab" style navigation, "tabs" don't have to be vertical. http://www.modtalk.co.uk/article/c-a...gn/dhtml-tabs/

2/ Use AJAX to load on demand from the server.

bear in mind accessibility will be important for a chamber of commerce site and using AJAX exclusively pretty much makes accessibility non-existent.

If you just build separate pages, and each page shares the same data for headers, footer, etc, the shared stuff will be cached (at least the images will), and you will barely (if at all) notice the re-rendering of the page. If all of your styles are kept in an external CSS document, that will also be cached.

Originally Posted by wayfarer07

If you just build separate pages, and each page shares the same data for headers, footer, etc, the shared stuff will be cached (at least the images will), and you will barely (if at all) notice the re-rendering of the page. If all of your styles are kept in an external CSS document, that will also be cached.

That is definitely a good point. That's the way I think it should be. I didn't come up with this idea.

Especially since the site we are building is going to be fairly "light weight" as it is.

I agree with the tab plan. That does go fast and not lag and re render.