In the original incarnation of my website I used frames to keep the navigation buttons always visible on the right hand side of the page, even when the page itself was long enough to require some scrolling down to see it all. What I'd like to do is recreate that convenience, but without frames so there's no ugly scroll bar splitting the screen between the main portion and the buttons area, and I'd like to maintain my goal of creating the new incarnation of my site using VSD. I'm fairly novice at advanced HTML topics and know nothing of css (I built the original site using the now-defunct CuteSiteBuilder). I also want to keep the mouseover effect I currently have set up.

Is this a candidate for some sort of Flash-based navigation panel? If so, what is the best application for creating a floating panel with mouseover that can be imported into VSD? I bought the whole CC package so any CC app is available to me.

My test site is at:

http://www.spinland.biz/test

For the morbidly curious, the old site I'm attempting to re-create is at:

http://www.spinland.biz

Right now the test site just has a partial home page and one other page, but the menu buttons are in place with the desired mouseover effects in place.

Thanks in advance!

Spinny,

Are you trying to eliminate scroll bars completely and just have a long page?

I haven't used frames in a long time, but I think there is a CSS style to eliminate the scroll bar. overflow:hidden; will eliminate the scroll bar, but clip the content.

try this: <frame src="frame_a.htm" scrolling="no" />

See if that does what you want.

Bill,

Thanks for the response. I /think/ I'm trying to eliminate use of frames altogether. I'm not even really sure they're supported in VSD? I know that some of what I've read around here tells me frames aren't really considered a good design approach. I'm throwing all my old code out the window and starting from scratch, trying to replicate most of the original "look and feel" of my old site using VSD plus possibly imports from other CC products as needed.

In the case of a long page, I'd like the buttons to continue to be displayed even when the user has scrolled down what might be a considerable amount; as though "floating" in the same position to the right of the view regardless of how the main part of the page is scrolled. What I'm after might not even be possible from within VSD, but I figured I'd ask in case someone knows a trick or two.

Am I making any sense? I suppose I'm not literate enough in the coding aspect of this even to know how to ask the right questions.

Spinny,

I don't know if what you want to do can be done with VSD, but with the HTML editor, it should be able to be done. I am thinking that you may need to keep the scroll bar unless you are willing to get a new menu program.

Take a look at this site and see if that is similar to what you want:

http://dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/staticmenu3.htm

Dynamic Drive is a good site for an assortment of free things.

Bill,

That's a good start. I have a lot to consider, here, including what level of actual coding I'm willing to undertake.

Really appreciate the insights, and the DD link. Thanks!

Oh, I didn't realize you were already redoing this to do without the frames.

Yeah, I was kind of vague about the status of the old site I linked in the other thread. Sorry about that. The /test version is where the current status of the re-build will live until I'm ready to go "live" with it.

I built that old one with CuteSiteBuilder, mainly because that's the software my host provider recommended, and their customers got it at a discount. I got into the code of it, and it's really a mess. There are three versions of each page, the page style is done with frames, it renames all your images to pseudo-random strings, and it's just impossible to maintain with a traditional HTML editor unless you understand the whys and wherefores of how the structure was set up. As a software engineer that really bugged me but I needed a fast site build and didn't have the cash to hire someone to do it for me.

Recently I decided it was high time to scrap the site and streamline it and generally improve the quality of the code, even if on the surface the site ends up looking much the same as it used to. The CC stuff actually creates compliant code that'll pass a standards test, which is nice, and after I'm done wringing out what VSD can do I'll be firing up the other applications and learning some of the coding practices. It's never a bad idea to learn new stuff, you never know when that might become leverage.