I am very new to this but have managed to create my first website for our local french club after buying VSD; www.afrockhampton.com I realise it is not good but it has proven to be very successful in attracting and acquiring new members. I have a few questions, and although detailed responses are always good, I would be happy with opinions on what strategies or technologies I should study to make my website better.
My initial areas for improvement are:
1. I have created menus that "drop-down" but when I make changes I have to change over 10 menus and save them back up again.. What strategy would improve this?
2. Committe Members would like to be able to modify the text content, but are even more IT illiterate than I am.. Is there an easy editor that can be invoked from any web browser to modify this content? ie so they would not have to learn VSD or have any editor loaded on their PC...
3. What is the easiest way to play a sound file? ie requirement is for visitors to click on a button and have a 30 second .mp3 or wave file play?
4. Finally, iPhone users have reported that my menus and footer "float" on their browser. Should this be a seperate post? Any users had similar experience? I would like to get some strategies on this problem as I think iPhones are starting to get very popular..
Thanks in advance!

Nice site SteveM,

Quite well done for someone just starting on webdesign. I don't know the answers to all of your questions, but:

1. To change this menu problem you will need to use either PHP includes or SSI includes. Basically they are small pieces of code you call separate pages with and these pages have your sections in them that you want to change on only 1 page to fix all pages with. It's similar to the system that CSS uses in the sense that a line of code tells the site page that it needs to use an external source for styling, and with includes it tells it that it needs to use an external source to input something in this spot.

Googling either of them should give you a good idea of where to start on that. I don't know enough about VSD to know if it allows you to use includes or not, I'm sure someone else will have that answer though so hang tight on that.

2. The only way to do this is to give them the file(s) to edit which means the .vnu file that you are using. I personally wouldn't suggest having too many hands in the pot so to speak as it can get pretty messy if one person messes it up. Not only that, each time someone edits they would have to download the .vnu file "prior" to editing so that they were editing with the exact .vnu file that the last person that edited used (VSD automatically uploads this file). That means each person 'HAS' to be sure to download the .vnu file and if they forget and they edit it with the one they already had then the last person's changes are gone. Just a real messy situation. I would keep it to yourself and maybe 1 other person, but have your committee submit their changes to you rather than everyone having access. Just my suggestion.

If you do decide to go for giving them all access, then they will each need to have their own copy of whatever program you are planning to use. And you will need to be sure you have an FTP system setup so each person can upload files and and download the .vnu file.

3. unknown how VSD handles this, I'm sure someone else will have good suggestions though.

4. I'm not sure what to do to fix this, I used to know, but I can't see on my site what I did lol. But I did want you to realize that your main menu floats in Firefox too so it's not just an iPhone issue. Not sure why the footer menu would float in iPhone either, it's not floating in Firefox at all.

Good luck on it

Jo,
Many thanks for the reply! Appreciate that... I have a lot of reading to do... I will also download Firefox so I can at least test my site in that... not too sure how I'll go about fixing the "floating" menu but I'll have a bit of a play around...

Cheers,
Steve

Hi Steve,

1: As VSD has no built-in drop-down menu maker, you did this (very clever) with a javascript script (I saw this looking at the source of the page, I was very curious how you did this ). A hell of a job for sure, because you have to code all the connections to the corresponding VSD pages by hand. There's no solution for this. The best way is to avoid drop-down menus completely. I made an example of how to do this for another VSD user by combining horizontal and vertical menus, giving the same functionality. Look here: www.johnvanhulst.com/probike (click on 'bikes' or 'services' to see what I mean).

2: The best way (and easiest way) to make it possible for your visitors to edit content is by integrating a blog page inside your VSD design with Iframe, a HTML option for showing a "website in a website". I use this all the time. Register some free blog somewhere (there are many) and 'iframe' this blog inside your pages with the HTML tool. If you want an example I'll make one for you with VSD.

3: If you want no more than this, the solution is simple and very easy: place a button on your page with the text 'download MP3' (or something) and make a link to your MP3 file with the 'link to a document' option. The document then is your MP3 file, the file is uploaded automatically to your server! The local music player of your visitor will play the MP3. Although you might think a document is a document , in fact it means anything, any file that you offer your visitors as a download. You can do this with your PDF (appform.pdf) too, or whatever...
If you want more than this consider buying Coffeecups Jukebox software. Integration with VSD isn't difficult at all.

4: I have no idea.

P.S. Your 'Fees' link isn't working, I guess because of a typo in the link.

John

John,
Thank you for this... the feedback from these forums exceed my expectations. I look forward to the day when I can contribute something back in the way of knowledge.

Your matrix example on the alternative to drop-down menu is brilliant! Thanks for the testing on the "fees" link, a symptom of my "multiple-update" issue.. You are correct I made a typo whilst changing one of the many menus.. You may note that the fees page is called correctly from many other pages but not from the "timetable" page.. These drop down menus are causing me much effort in testing, but users love them.. You asked how I did the drop down menus... basically by creating one and then copying and modifying the code, keeping the same syntax/structure for all the others.. as you have pointed out very time consuming and fiddly.. The original "one liner" code I got was from "DHTML Menu Builder", I created one example and then copied/modified the others in the editor...
Regards,
Steve

Thanks, Steve. You can download this design here: www.johnvanhulst.com/probike/probike.vnu

P.S. Do you like Steve Miller?

Thanks for that... as in the musician?... yeah, he's alright....