Question : Front Page 2003

Hello,

I have a question and would like some help. Take a look at this site http://www.ryancompanies.com

I would like to create the same look and feel using frontpage. I would especially like to know the exact steps in creating that menu driven pages when one clicks on a link and it pulls down a menu which one clicks on and it brings up a page.

Can someone please tell me the steps to do this and how to in Front Page 2003.

Thanks in advance.

Answer : Front Page 2003

The ryanco webpage you reference was developed using MS Visual studio 6.0. This has the benefit of not trying to second guess you the way FrontPage does. I personally prefer developing using PHP Designer 2005 which supports marked up editing of not only PHP but html , css, perl etc.

The ryanco site attempts as best as possible to confuse the enduser by obfuscating file names and types. Consequently the whole site is not viewable in Firefox/NS6 etc.

However under the hood you will find a borderless frameset with the different parts in different frames supported by CSS stylesheets. The top navigation is all in http://www.ryancompanies.com/topNav.htm and consists of  six javascript functions some more CSS which together support a complex series of anchor tags and images which link to the appropriate pages and generate the submenus.

You may find it profitable to analyse that code.

The biggest trick with menu generation is maintainability - and an app for automatically generating the code.
Tools like CoffeeCup Free DHTML menu builder http://www.coffeecup.com/free-dhtml/
will give you a start with an all javascript solution that is browser idependent.


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