Main Points

  • Content Page Navbars Here's the first go at a navbar for the content pages.
  • Deluxe Frame NavBar Sometimes you have to fall before you can fly. Here's our attempt at a navbar using frames. (Yes I should have known better... *grumble* *grumble*)

We'd learned a little about HTML by this point and were beginning to get into CSS and Javascript, but not enough to see menus on the horizon. This phase shows how we were trying to develop website navigation early on.

Content Page Navbars

Here's my first attempt at a template for all the content pages. I also have another file with header links but it's not yet organized.

The navbar as currently seen on our template has been fine tuned just in time for us to change the website structure. It now does not mention our three most important pages, Timelines, Reference Shelf, and Roman Forum except to link to the homepage where they can be accessed. Maybe this is enough, but we will have to think about what links should be on the main navbar. We also need to link in the CSS selector. (see below)

[chroniclemaster1, 2005/11/15]

Deluxe Frame NavBar

Hi! I've been talking about it forever, and I've finally figured out how to program the thing. Here's the deluxe navbar as done in frames. What the frame does is display two webpages at the same time, I've designed the one special navbar page that's small, and then the main page shows up in the main lower frame. Note the frame border can be dragged to resize the height if you want it larger or smaller. And yes that's not the beta site down there... that's the really for real EarthChronicle.com site linked right in. So play. You can interact with the main lower window normally. However, any link that you click in the navbar replaces what's in the lower window, so the navbar remains for you to use as you want. I'm not sure how much to explain about frames, so if you have any ideas, just ask and I'll be more than happy to tell you if I can do it.

Obviously we're not going to keep changing this version to be up to date, so it doesn't really go to Earth Chronicle anymore. It should have enough functionality to give you the general idea, and you can see Earth Chronicle as it appeared at the time.

[chroniclemaster1, 2009/03/14]

OK, I guess you have to go to all the trouble of learning something inside out and figuring out all the tips and tricks before you can really say... that's awful, it's not going to work. Frames suck, primarily because frames destroy bookmarking. With the importance of links and identifying webpages on the internet, frames are not a viable option for any website. We are still looking at the same conceptual design for our navbar, one file that can be easily changed and is requested by all webpages (probably using a <link>). We are trying to see if a Javascript will work. *rolling eyes* At the very least I'll learn Javascript out of it. Javascript would also eliminate separate navbars, the script would be the content page navbar. Please let us know if you have any ideas. Or would like to help us program in Javascript... it'd be nice to have at least ONE person who knew what they were doing. ;)

[chroniclemaster1, 2005/11/15]

BREAKTHROUGH!?! I think I may have the guts of the navbar!!!! I've only been trying different options on that for about 10 of the 12 months I've been building this website. I have the navbar test up at navbarindex.html I have a 5 button navbar up at the top. I'd appreciate it if everyone could check this out. I'd like to know that it's working for everyone on their different computers, programs, and configurations. If it works, then it's golden, it'll probably be the most important piece of programming on the webpages. If it doesn't, I'll need to go back to the drawing board, preferably sooner rather than later. If anyone has a Mac, I'd be especially interested in your input. I don't have one to test this out on anywhere.

[chroniclemaster1, 2006/04/14]

Well, it's over a year later as I read this and am prepping everything for the transition to ASP.NET 2.0 and our first official "real" web host. This seems like it begs the question, if this was so promising, what happened? SEO. This technique is apparently one of the tricks that some unscrupulous marketers use to give high Google marks to bad pages. Now as long as you don't get caught, I'm sure it's great, but if you do your site suddenly drops off the face of the Earth. For an internet marketer who just dumps the site and starts over, it's no big deal. But for a site like ours that trades on its reputation and hopes to be around for a long time, this doesn't look particularly feasible. The answer in the revamp is server side includes.

The purpose of the meta pages was to give the site flexibility by allowing us to reprogram where the XHTML code sent visitors without having to reprogram every webpage on the site. Well, server side includes go one better; they let us remove that whole chunk of XHTML to one file, achieving code separation and maintainability at a stroke. If you would like to see where we went from here, the continuation of navbar development is chronicled in our XHTML changeover section. If you're interested in the Javascript programming that made it possible check out our navbar development using unobtrusive Javascript.

[chroniclemaster1, 2007/06/23]