Best practice for page layout?

CreativeA

Hi all,

Just wondering what's the best practice for laying out pages.
I know that most designers place everything within borders on the pages so the page is resolution friendly.

Also, is there a way, when creating navigation bars (without using frames) where they can be edited accross a whole website in one go?

:eek:

Gordon

As far as I understand, the good designers use Photoshop to create the layout and then work the HTML to emulate that layout. Is that what you mean?

I'm not speaking from vast experience but for the navigation bars to be sitewide-editable in one go - I think you'd need to use some sort of include like a PHP include for that, I could be wrong though. If you include your menu.php that contains your menu then you only need to change your menu.php to alter the navigation throughout the site.

Do you know css?

louie

css is the way to go and use php or asp.
this way you can have the layout broken into common parts.

header
left
right
footer

any of them can be included on the fly.

CreativeA

Oh that's right, they would trace the image and display it in Dreamweaver - I kind of meant though displaying the actual page so that viewers with really low resolution screens can still view the page clearly.

I think you're right -needs to be php or maybe flash would work.... hmmm

I know a little CSS. www.creativecreatures.ie is the site I'm working on at the moment --

CreativeA

I wouldn't have a clue how to implement php or asp I'm afraid. Is it hard?
I have done some pragramming before - Java only.

louie

if you don't use a database, you don't really need to know php.
just save the pages as .php instead .html

to include a file you just write
<?php require_once "filename.php"?>

mneylon

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/keepingcurrent/

democrates

Important to check your site renders well in more than one browser, I test against Firefox on linux and Win and IE on Win. I develop in Firefox because it has plugins to help web developers such as Web Developer, HTML Validator, and CssViewer. The validator is particularly handy as you see immediately if your page is up to w3c spec and if not why not.

But IE is and will remain a significant presence so I'm obliged to test using it too, that sometimes requires workarounds. Beware of some of the css puritan sites, I've found a some who spend ages evangelising css throughout their examples only to say at the end, oh yeah, and this doesn't work on IE because it does not comply with web standards. Not something I could sell.

PS require('header.php') is a weeny bit faster than require_once according to one of the authors of php but probably not relevant unless performance is a big problem.

CreativeA

Thanks BNight - Great article -
Thanks also democrates - good advice.. Do you know if I can download IE for the Mac or will I need to test on a PC?

democrates

CreativeA wrote:

Thanks BNight - Great article -
Thanks also democrates - good advice.. Do you know if I can download IE for the Mac or will I need to test on a PC?

IE for the mac is no more. It was buggy anyway and required specific css hacks. Sadly I've found no way to emulate IE running on XP so I've been obliged to send more cash to ms for xp (win98 is no longer patched for security).

At least I dual-boot ubuntu so I can get more value from the hardware and reduce the outrage of the situation. If you find a way out of this trap please post.

CreativeA

Checked it on IE in work today. Is fairly different looking.
Hmmmmmm.