I have a new part of my website for online tutoring. There is a navigation area near the top that when you click on it brings you to the information down below (not on a separate page). There are about 5 of these buttons (i.e. “About Me”, “Getting Started”).
The top of the webpage is built off of Master 1 so i do not want to make a new master for this tutoring area.
What I want to do is this…
When the person CLICKS on the navigation button (i.e. About Me), it shows the information below (I used anchors for this), but I STILL WANT THE NAVIGATION buttons to always show. Right now they disappear and the person has to scroll back to the top to click on the others.
here is the page… it is being worked on, so please ignore spelling and layout, etc.
I think you need to apply the sticker action by Walter Davis to the menu in order to keep it on it’s place while scrolling. Download it here : Sticker - ActionsForge
I would set the navigation bar element to have position:fixed (Position: Fixed in Window in Freeway-interface-speak) using the Inspector. Then use the SmoothScroll Action on the page, and set the top offset to whatever the height of your navigation bar is.
This will cause two things to happen.
All clicks to anchors on your page will have a neat animation effect, which can be really cool and instructive (since if you aren’t paying exquisite attention, an anchor move in a page can look a lot like a page change on a fast computer, and you may lose the context of where you are).
The anchor cannot target a spot 1 navigation bar above itself, so if you have stuck the navigation bar in place (no matter how, this is why Sticker Action isn’t such a good choice here), all of your anchors will appear UNDER your navigation bar, which is certainly not what you want.
Walter
On Aug 25, 2013, at 11:31 AM, Barry Hoffman wrote:
Hi all,
Some small help needed if you have time.
I have a new part of my website for online tutoring. There is a navigation area near the top that when you click on it brings you to the information down below (not on a separate page). There are about 5 of these buttons (i.e. “About Me”, “Getting Started”).
The top of the webpage is built off of Master 1 so i do not want to make a new master for this tutoring area.
What I want to do is this…
When the person CLICKS on the navigation button (i.e. About Me), it shows the information below (I used anchors for this), but I STILL WANT THE NAVIGATION buttons to always show. Right now they disappear and the person has to scroll back to the top to click on the others.
here is the page… it is being worked on, so please ignore spelling and layout, etc.
one thing that i remember from using the smooth scroll action (and correct me if i’m wrong), is that when a person clicks on a link after smooth scrolling down, then hits the back arrow in browser, it does not take them to where they were in the webpage, but instead to the top of the web page. I stopped using that action a while ago on a page I had for math links. The student would click on FRACTIONS at the top, it would scroll down with a cool effect and show 10 links for fractions. When the student hit one link and checked out the fraction site and came back to my math page, they were now at the top each time.
If this is still true, can I do what you suggest above without using that action?
I’m not sure how SmoothScroll could have done that – the only way that it works is to identify the target of a link, determine if it is on the current page, and then animate the move to show that element. Any time you see a link that doesn’t work in SmoothScroll (behaves like a back to top anchor), it’s because that link is to a non-existent element.
Walter
On Aug 25, 2013, at 5:30 PM, Barry Hoffman wrote:
Walt,
one thing that i remember from using the smooth scroll action (and correct me if i’m wrong), is that when a person clicks on a link after smooth scrolling down, then hits the back arrow in browser, it does not take them to where they were in the webpage, but instead to the top of the web page. I stopped using that action a while ago on a page I had for math links. The student would click on FRACTIONS at the top, it would scroll down with a cool effect and show 10 links for fractions. When the student hit one link and checked out the fraction site and came back to my math page, they were now at the top each time.
If this is still true, can I do what you suggest above without using that action?
No Walt,
I probably was not clear. On the page that had this SS action…
the navigation button at the top. You click it, it scrolls down the page as it should. It brings you to a hyperlink lets say down your page. You click it. You are now on a new webpage. Now you want to go back tot he page you were just on (the one that had the smooth scroll). So you hit the back arrow and it always brings you to the TOP of the page (the one that had the smooth scroll).
Normally when you hit back arrow, it brings you to the prior page, but where you were on that page (not the top).
Oh, that’s entirely understandable, and there’s no way around it. The click is “swallowed” by the Action, so the browser’s navigation stack isn’t updated by it. The click ordinarily would have added the anchor to the history, so back would mean back to page.html#foo rather than just page.html.
Walter
On Aug 25, 2013, at 5:40 PM, Barry Hoffman wrote:
No Walt,
I probably was not clear. On the page that had this SS action…
the navigation button at the top. You click it, it scrolls down the page as it should. It brings you to a hyperlink lets say down your page. You click it. You are now on a new webpage. Now you want to go back tot he page you were just on (the one that had the smooth scroll). So you hit the back arrow and it always brings you to the TOP of the page (the one that had the smooth scroll).
Normally when you hit back arrow, it brings you to the prior page, but where you were on that page (not the top).
i could probably be ok with it in this instance since they are not scrolling to links like I did with math and science a while ago. THis need now is more normal where they are scrolling just to read text so I would like to follow your advice. My problem is that I keep changing the “offset from top” number and cannot find the right place to get the VERY top of the page (master header stuff) and the navigation buttons to always stay.
(also thanks for the link to the read about typography) I learned a lot from it.
i think my problem is that my naviagtion button is actually in a table. The reason is I was using cell BG a quick way to get a rollover, but I should prob redo all this navigation buttons to fix the position
I cannot make a whole new master because the TOP part of the page is connected to Master 1.
There is no reason why you cannot duplicate your Master 1 (to make Master 2) make the changes you want to it and then use it as the base for the original page and the rest.
You just have to make sure that you delete all content on the 1st child page that is based on Master 1 before you change it to use Master 2 (otherwise you will get duplicates).
that makes sense, BUT what will happen if I need to make a change to the TOP of MASTER 1…? Will these changes still take affect on the TOP of the ones that work off Master 2?
… BUT what will happen if I need to make a change to the TOP of MASTER 1…? Will these changes still take affect on the TOP of the ones that work off Master 2?
Masters are not connected to each other so you’d have to make those changes separately on each master (as far as I am oriented).
Master-concepts are a big challenge and I think, that anyway only those parts that are common to EACH single child page should be placed on masters. It’s part of my “don’t overthink master” concept which is ending up in a more modular-thinking of reusable parts (especially in inline-constructions).
Since doing this, I reduced the amount of masters from a couple to only “one” or “two”. The other masters have more a back-up function.
So in your specific case:
All above the white divider = master, all below changeable child page content.
A note to “graphic-menu-approaches”.
It might be, that a search engine doesn’t recognize your page as a continuum, but as a stack or cluster of single pages when doing a graphic oriented menu.
I am under the impression that some of those search-engines dislike such approaches. So anti-alias is not really the problem, but more the SEO and here ranking (if necessary). That’s why I never ever would do anything else then css-menu which is a styled list of links, recognizable as a web-project.
Just a thought - probably more dedicated to all followers, cause I’m convinced that Barry’s page is popular even without all that fancy SEO stuff.
Thanks Thomas. I will make the needed changes. Interestingly my site is one of the lesser number that does not tailor for the “world” to find or for searches.
It is strictly a popular and useful local site for current students, prior students, parents and now my new online tutor business (which is still only for local kids).
Looks is more important than searchability actually. Not sure if that makes total sense.
I did the classic “back to top” link at the end of each written text. I did take Walt;s advice and add the scroll to the page despite whenever I upload at my classroom (like today) the scroll action times out and it uploads without it. Then when I am home it kicks in again.