Hey all,

I'm working on a redesign of a site and am just looking for suggestions on what kind of setup I should look at.

The current site is built primarily on (gasp) tables... so my plan is to replace that setup with CSS, but I'm also wondering what the best way to build a kind of template.

The current site basically has a main page with an iframe smacked into the middle and all the content loaded into it... it's nice because the content within the frame doesn't need to be dolled up much. With newer sites I've worked on, I've switched to loading the content via AJAX -- but that obviously comes with its limitations.

Bearing in mind my unfamiliarity with a CSS-based layout and what I've said above -- how might you suggest I go about this design?

Thanks in advance

As for the CSS layout, you can consider using a grid system like http://nettuts.com/tutorials/html-cs...css-framework/

Or, get a full understanding of how to lay out with CSS here http://matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/u...d-pixel-widths

I understand there are great reasons for using ajax, though I am not sure to mimick iframes would be my choice. If you are using iframes because you simply want one file for the navigation for instance, you can do this with php page includes or SSI. Believe me, you don't really need to know that much about PHP to do this. It will keep all your sections separate, like the footer, header, navigation, whatever you want thus having only one file to update for the whole site.

What was the main reasoning behind the iframes? Maybe we can help based on that.

The idea behind the iframes and the later AJAX-based sites was to reduce page rendering and make it easier to modify the entire site because there was really just one page to alter (the page containing the frame)... everything else was more or less text and very little design.

Hi,
When using AJAX with CSS in our website, is it easy to access website users?

Well, I would like to see a link to the site to get a feel of what is going on, and then I would be able to offer you some suggestions.

I mean what type of niche is it? Are you going to be using CMS at all? Or is it going to be all static?

What type of market are you into? Do you have photoshop skills to be able to design a nice clean web 2.0 template?

Give me some more information and will be happy to get you more answers to help you out.

The site I will be rebuilding is phoenix.fasports.com.

A more recent site I built with the AJAX format (but still table layout) was http://www.foothillsbaptist.org.

I will use a little bit of CMS... but the majority is likely to be static (it kind of depends as I go along how much I can rely on CMS).

As for the Photoshop skills... you can be the judge of that... but usually my designs are fairly behind the curve, unfortunately.

Thanks for the help!

Originally Posted by msaz87

The site I will be rebuilding is phoenix.fasports.com.

A more recent site I built with the AJAX format (but still table layout) was http://www.foothillsbaptist.org.

I will use a little bit of CMS... but the majority is likely to be static (it kind of depends as I go along how much I can rely on CMS).

As for the Photoshop skills... you can be the judge of that... but usually my designs are fairly behind the curve, unfortunately.

Thanks for the help!

Thanks, I just woke up lol, going to wake up a bit and find out what we can help you out with here.

Take note of the URL when going through the pages of the [church] site. For most, there is no way to bookmark them nor let us know what page we are currently on. Not very good for SEO.

I would seriously consider using the php include technique for the header, menu and footer if you are only trying to make maintaining easy. Then the pages will have better URL's and you will only have one file to update.

With the php include option -- would all the pages have to be php, or can you do includes for html files? I'm obviously not too familiar with php... but I'm comfortable enough with it to possible try your suggestion.

Thanks

Sorry I took so long to answer, been away for a few days.

Here is a tut on the subject of includes:
http://www.w3schools.com/PHP/php_includes.asp

Yes, every page will need the php extension, but your xhtml will be basically the same.

Just design your page as normal and then break it up into chunks. For example, Take everything from the doctype to just past the navigation area. Save this code in its own file named header.php.

Now when you create a new page like index.php you can simply put at the first line:
<?php include("header.php"); ?> (That is the extent of PHP you will need to know)

Then code your page as normal from that point(in this case, after the navigation area). When you view the source of the live page, you will see that php has placed all the code form your header file into the page.

One last note, when you work with PHP you will need to be on either a live site or have a local server set up on your computer like http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html.

Good luck!

Thanks for the suggestions... I definitely think I will try the php option and see how it works out.

Thanks again!