One option is to add Book as a menu item (e.g. at the end of the menu). This is similar to what we do with the Softpress website: if you go to the Xway page of our website (or any product page) you should see that there are two menu options (Try and Buy) that are added after Support. These will (of course) also show up in hamburger menus.
Another option is to create a link (or multiple links) anywhere on a page. We’ve also done this on our Xway page (i.e. you can do both). You can apply a link to any text, or container box, or graphic.
If you want a button to appear permanently near the top of the screen, you can also do this without making it a menu item. The trick is to add an absolute-positioned item to a parent box that also contains the menu, and position this in front of (and to the right or left of) the menu. Some of the Xway templates (e.g. Portfolio and Retro’d) do this. You can view templates by choosing New from Template from the File menu. To install (or update) templates, choose Install Templates from the Xway (application) menu.
If you have pages that should display a button or menu item, and pages where it isn’t needed, a good way to deal with this is to use multiple master pages: e.g. create a master page that contains the default menu (and/or header) and then create a second master page that is based on the first master page and which adds the extra element(s). Choose whichever master is appropriate for your site pages.
Also, you might want to explain what you mean by a button here. If you mean the form control (literally a button tag) then you would need to wrap that in a form to ensure that it did something. A button on its own is not going to link anywhere. But if you mean a graphic that looks visually like a form button, then you can apply a link to that, just as you would any other image on your page.
I’m able to create a simple button, but … I’m not able to create text to have on the button
I wonder if you’re using a form control for your button? If you’re adding a button that takes people to a booking page, the simplest way to do this is to add an ordinary text box (not a form control) which contains the text you want to display (“Book now!”). You can add a background colour and rounded corners to the box, so it looks more like a button, and you can add a link directly to this box. You can also use a graphic to do this.
Rounded corners aren’t directly supported in Xway yet (we will add them in a future update) but it’s easy to add them using an extended property (search for “rounded corners” in the Xway User Guide).
[Update: I wrote this before I saw Walter’s reply, which is along similar lines to what I’ve written.]
I like the idea of adding the ‘Book Now’ link to the menu.
Is there a simple way of creating that without adding a page to our website?
For example, if we could just add ‘Book Now’ to the menu, and when we click on that, it would take us offsite to our booking platform.
That would be ideal, I think.
If we could change the text to Bold that would be even better!
I’m currently trying to do that now.
No luck so far….
You can add “Book Now” to the menu by duplicating the last menu item (select it and choose Duplicate Selection from the Edit menu). Change the text to “Book Now”.
To add an external link to the booking platform: select the “Book Now” item and choose Link from the Format menu to open the Link dialog (choose External from the Link Type popup).
To change the text to bold: open the Text section of the Box Inspector (while the menu item is selected) and choose Bold or Bolder from the Weight popup.
I failed to notice that you posted this as a Freeway question rather than an Xway question - so many of my answers will have been confusing.
But you can still add “Book Now” to a Freeway menu which uses the CSS Menus Action:
Click inside the box to which the Action is applied, and add a new list item (e.g. at the end).
Set its text to “Book Now”
Select “Book Now” and set an external link after choosing External Hyperlink from the Edit menu
Choose the Bold button in the Character section of the Inspector palette.
(Do this on a master page.)
Some other points:
I don’t think it’s possible to add a link to a container (HTML) box in Freeway, as you can in Xway (you don’t need to do this unless you are creating a box “button”, and you can use a graphic for the same purpose).
Freeway doesn’t support multiple master pages
If you based your website on a Freeway template, there is probably an Xway version of this template, in case you decide to upgrade to Xway in future (Freeway won’t run on recent versions of macOS). Xway can also import content from Freeway documents.
Looking at the website now, I can see that I have included every page as a Master Page.
It may have been a mistake I made years ago, and then because everything was working ok, it was easier to just keep going….
(The website is currently Freeway, but I will shift to Xway over the Christmas break)
So I am wondering now, how is the CSS Menu working?
If I could simply add, as you mentioned, the ‘Book Now’ to the current CSS Menu, then everything would be ok.
Is there a simple way of finding out where I made the CSS Menu?
Is it something that you could see from looking at the websites ‘code’?
I think it may be easiest for me to see what is happening if you send me a copy of your Freeway document. It’s probably too large to email, but if you share it via a file transfer service (e.g. Dropbox) and send a link to support at softpress dot com, I’ll take a look at it.
I see what you’ve done now: it’s not so much that every page is a master page, but every page has its own master page which contains all the content for that page. You’ve added the menu to each of these master pages, so there are actually seven menus.
I think the simplest thing for now might be to update the menu on each of those master pages.
Alternatively, you could update your Freeway document so that each page depends on a single master page (“Main Master”), but I had problems when I tried to do this. If you’re planning to upgrade to Xway at some point, I’d suggest that you do this in Xway, where support for master pages is more robust. Xway also uses more up-to-date CSS layout methods, so the easiest option (when you do upgrade) would be to start again using an Xway template and recreate your site by copying content across from your Freeway document: Xway can open Freeway documents, so it’s easy to copy content from an old Freeway document into a new document that is based on an Xway template. If you originally used the Freeway Health template there is an Xway version of this template (and most of the other Freeway templates).
Generally, a good approach in Freeway and Xway is to organise pages so that they are divided into a small number of logical sections (e.g. header, main, and footer) where some sections (e.g. header and footer) contain content that is shared across pages, while other sections (e.g. main) contain content that is unique to each page. Typically, a menu might be part of the header section, or it could have its own separate section. I can see that your document mainly follows this pattern (and the section names look similar to the section names used in Freeway templates), except that you have created unnecessary duplications of the original master page.
It seems the current menu (“ Home News Services Our Team Products Location Contact Us”)
Is different to the CSS Menu in Freeway I can see when I click on that area, and what’s visible is:
“Home
About
Portfolio
Services
Contact”
Can you see where I could add the ‘Book Now’ link to the existing Menu?
(“ Home News Services Our Team Products Location Contact Us”)
I looked at your document again, and (ignoring the master page issue) this had me stumped for a while - effectively, whatever you put in your menu is ignored when the page is published.
But the answer is that if you look in the CSS Menus settings (in the Actions palette) there is a checkbox that says “Auto-generate Navigation Menu”, with a help tag (tool tip) saying “Generate a navigation menu from the pages and folders contained in your site”. From what I can see, this overrides anything that you put in the menu, so what you need to do (in your case) is to turn it off.
You will need to turn it off for the menu on each master page.
The other thing you will need to do is to ensure that each of the menu items is linked to its correct page: select the menu list item text and use the Hyperlink command in the Edit menu to link it to the appropriate page (previously the auto-generate option was doing this for you). Once again, you will need to do this for the menu on each master page.
