I’m trying to figure our the smart way of doing this (rather than resorting to multiple frames).
I have a CSS menu on the left of the page. How can I make those menu items, which are clickable links, change content/image etc on the right hand side of the page.
Ultimately the CSS Menus will be hierarchical with a large number of links The links will be describing different types of cheese…
What smart method am I missing here?
Thanks
Adam
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How is the cheese presented? Have you made these individual link targets as separate pages? You can use Ajax to load the result of a link into the page without forcing a refresh, but you will need to do some preparatory work to make sure that you don’t end up with a two-headed atrocity. (You have to strip the head off of the page you’re going to insert into another page, because you can’t have two head tags or two body tags in one page.)
Walter
On Sep 7, 2015, at 4:50 PM, Adam email@hidden wrote:
Hi,
I’m trying to figure our the smart way of doing this (rather than resorting to multiple frames).
I have a CSS menu on the left of the page. How can I make those menu items, which are clickable links, change content/image etc on the right hand side of the page.
Ultimately the CSS Menus will be hierarchical with a large number of links The links will be describing different types of cheese…
OK, thanks. Since this site is in its infancy, I can prep things anyway I want, so yes the cheeses will have their own pages. And I’ll make sure to strip headers out - this sounds like a good way of doing it.
Thanks.
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When I speak of stripping out the head of the page, I means precisely applying the PHP Make Insert Page Action to each “cheese” page. This will strip everything except the content of the tag out of the published page, and if you were to visit that page directly, it would look pretty bad. But if you are using External Stylesheets and then use a script to insert that headless page into another page that referenced the original stylesheet, you would see your page again, exactly the way you intended it, just inserted into the surrounding page.
One more tip about this, I would recommend making your cheese pages from a master page, and not modifying them (except for actual content) in any way. This will give you the greatest degree of success without a lot of hand-coding needed.
Let me know when you have a few of the pieces together, and I will show you how easy Prototype makes it to insert one page in another.
Walter
On Sep 7, 2015, at 10:39 PM, Adam email@hidden wrote:
OK, thanks. Since this site is in its infancy, I can prep things anyway I want, so yes the cheeses will have their own pages. And I’ll make sure to strip headers out - this sounds like a good way of doing it.
I’m trying to figure our the smart way of doing this
I remain unconvinced of the benefits of this design strategy.
If a user wishes to access content, then why not take the user to that content? If it is an appreciable amount of content, why not give it it’s own page?
If it’s not enough content to warrant a whole page, or if the content is only topical in the context of the current page, then why store it elsewhere? Hide/reveal techniques work better to shape focus than to manage page length… if length is the problem then why not edit content to better fit the user’s experience?
An example that comes to mind is-- once upon a time-- we all made About pages. Only it turned out that there weren’t always a need to talk about the origin or history of a group, their awards and citations, yakety yak yak, etc. It was just basic Contact information was all. So many designers transformed the About to a Contact Us page. Myself, I now put such information in the page Footer… always accessible to the user without the need to make it an extra (exasperating) step to someone who is just looking for a phone number or address.
Now if the site is about a company with several offices and I didn’t want the footer to become a confusing mess, then something like disclosure triangles might focus the user’s desire for content (while also un-cluttering the footer). Though I would certainly need to be careful in guiding that experience to an outcome that is successful for both the user and site owner. In that case maybe a whole page-- with maps and stuff-- may well be warranted.
I guess all I wanted to say is that I think the smartest thing about content delivery is Keeping It Simple.
I think that’s a valid case to consider. I wonder if we may be trying to solve the wrong problem, since perhaps the issue is that the CSS menu won’t show expanded state on a full page load, so it isn’t useful as a way finding tool without this sort of partial page load experience.
Another argument for single pages is the ease of sharing a particular URL versus “go here, then click this, then click that”-- or worse, those !# fragments in the URL–always looks looks like you’re swearing in a comic book.
Walter
On Sep 8, 2015, at 8:17 AM, The Big Erns email@hidden wrote:
I’m trying to figure our the smart way of doing this
I remain unconvinced of the benefits of this design strategy.
If a user wishes to access content, then why not take the user to that content? If it is an appreciable amount of content, why not give it it’s own page?
If it’s not enough content to warrant a whole page, or if the content is only topical in the context of the current page, then why store it elsewhere? Hide/reveal techniques work better to shape focus than to manage page length… if length is the problem then why not edit content to better fit the user’s experience?
An example that comes to mind is-- once upon a time-- we all made About pages. Only it turned out that there weren’t always a need to talk about the origin or history of a group, their awards and citations, yakety yak yak, etc. It was just basic Contact information was all. So many designers transformed the About to a Contact Us page. Myself, I now put such information in the page Footer… always accessible to the user without the need to make it an extra (exasperating) step to someone who is just looking for a phone number or address.
Now if the site is about a company with several offices and I didn’t want the footer to become a confusing mess, then something like disclosure triangles might focus the user’s desire for content (while also un-cluttering the footer). Though I would certainly need to be careful in guiding that experience to an outcome that is successful for both the user and site owner. In that case maybe a whole page-- with maps and stuff-- may well be warranted.
I guess all I wanted to say is that I think the smartest thing about content delivery is Keeping It Simple.