Hello!

After maintaining my simple homeowners website via Visual Site Designer for the last 2.5 years or so, it's time for me to do some housekeeping and reorganization.

Obviously, any major reorg will also require a re-jiggering of the menu running down the left side of each page on my site.

I have actually already begun the process, but for the longer term I would like to begin managing my menu a little bit better and a little bit more efficiently (ie, not having to cut/paste it onto each page of my site, and not having to have a jillion little redundant JPG files on my server to represent each button on each page).

My current menu is 9 items. Two of them "drill down" to sub-topics; the rest are either content pages or simply PDF repositories (for homeowner bylaws, newsletters, and other PDF documents).

I am aware of several menuing options:

1. Manual management (this is what I currently do).
2. Flash Menu Builder.
3. CSS
4. DHTML(?)

I am not yet ready to take my site to CSS. The learning curve and wood-shedding is more than I can commit to at this time. I know even less about DHTML and in fact, I'm not even certain if it's something that stands on its own or if it is used by Flash or CSS.

In any event, I am tentatively leaning toward using Flash Menu Builder, because the tool seems to offer an easy hierarchical way for me to manage my pages and the order of buttons. I am put off by two things, however:

* I don't like designing my site with boxes only containing HTML HTML HTML in them. Visual Site Designer is supposed to be visual. I wish it were capable of pulling that HTML code in and turning it into an in-place preview. Or at the very least, VSD should be able to substitute the dummy HTML "box" with a single JPG representation of the finished menu.

* I am concerned about requiring my users to have Adobe Flash or other plugins installed just to see and navigate my website. Many of my neighbors will probably not know how to do this or will not feel comfortable about installing software just to be able to read and navigate this site.

Currently, the only part of my site that requires any sort of plugin is the "Contact the Webmaster" portion. If a user is not able to use that form, and if he's not willing to download or install the plugin, then he can always find another way to get his question answered (there are phone numbers and other contact methods listed on the site).

But by changing the menu itself (which is central to my site's navigation), will I be inadvertently preventing some users from accessing my site easily and without having to fiddle with plugins?

I welcome your suggestions, and thanks in advance!

Just so you are aware, you will be sacrificing search engine's finding you by using flash for your menu. In fact, if you want to be search engine friendly (you want people to find you), then a flash menu is the last thing you want. But, if you don't care or don't need to be search engine friendly, then it is fine.

If you use DHTML or Flash, offer an alternative navigation (i.e. footer links, sitemap.html).

The funny thing is that most sites don't need dropdown menus but the owner wants them because they look cool or professional in their opinion. It's like Dude, you have a drop down menu and none of them are more than two links deep - and you have a total of six pages on your site.

I am currently coding a DHTML menu for one of my sites--got side tracked this week by the egg hunt--but I looked all over the net for the best program and ended up back here and downloaded the free DHTML Menu builder.

This is the first such menu I have ever done and it is a challenge but a great learning experience. I wanted a transparent background and could not get that with anything but this program.

Actually a CSS menu can do pretty much anything a DHTML menu will with a bit of work and code adjusting, including the transparent backgrounds. I am still working on mine, I've put it aside while I did this darn egg hunt that I finally give up on and will test software instead LOL. I have better luck breaking software than I do finding eggs

Anyways, you can do graphical menus that can mimic almost exactly what you can do with a DHTML menu, it's just not quite as "easy" since the DHTML menu has a program doing it for you. The nice thing about the CSS menu though is you can change it any way you like. If the DHTML program doesn't have your feature, then you can't do it, period. You don't have that with a CSS menu.

That's really the major differences other than the Search Engine friendliness which for many is very important also. If neither of those makes a difference to you then by all means use the DHTML menu maker, it's definitely more fun

I also maintain a website for a small homeowners' association, and I found that (due to the prevalence of senior citizens among the homeowners), simple is always preferred over flashier, but possibly more complicated, alternatives. So I just stick with plain HTML links as far as the menu items are concerned.

I do, however, use a server-side include (php) to insert the html text-only nav list into the appropriate location on the page.

Your mileage may vary, however...

I like CSS Menu because I can easily go into the "lists" it produces and do minor editing using the HTML Editor.
Up till then I used a fully javascript based program which was irritating to make minor changes to, and the validator I used complained about coding errors produced by the program.

I can even add new menu items by entering them directly into the menu list*, and I guess I could also directly edit the stylesheets that CCS Menu produces if I wanted to*, I know enough HTML & CSS by now to be able to thoroughly make a mess of everything I touch. And I often do exactly that...

(*perhaps that's not a good idea, it's probably best to do as much as possible in the CSS Menu application for ease of retrievel for later mods).

Right on the bean, Joker! ...across the board.

Unless you don't GAD about SEO, use simple HTML links. Yup, dropdowns are kewl and flashy, but gramma and grampa have no clue what they are, and don't want to go searching for what they need. If it ain't right in front of them, they go somewhere else. Dropdowns are invisible.

Yes, I use JS, DHTML, and Flash dropdown menus occasionally, but only when backed up with simple text navigation/sitemaps... and only for websites of over probably 30 pages.

There has to be ONE menu in this page that you could get your head around!
http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/

Don't forget - noone is asking you to reinvent the wheel and that is where copying and pasting comes into play. I truly feel that getting your head around the minimal necessary to get some css going will give you tremendous satisfaction and raise your site to new heights! Particularly if you are doing a renovation in there anyway. And you will be keeping the SE happy too.

As a side note: using a strict CSS menu will be SEO friendly. Using a DHTML menu will not.