SHTML- HOW TO ?

[scottysweb]

I am building a basic website for a customer to upload to his server then he will take care of editing from the code side on the server. He has stated this: "I basically will need it set up in shtml so that its easy to add links to the navigation bar without going through tons of files."

First off, how would I go about doing this and secondly, he is requesting just a basic template site, is this possible with templates ? I hate templates and never use them so I'm kinda lost.

Have Webdesigner 7

[gwpriester]

I am not sure that Web Designer 7 is the best program for what you are trying to do unless your client want to work in Web Designer as well.

Web Designer is not designed as an HTML editing application. The focus is on intuitive WYSIWYG design.

That said, your client can download a free 30 day trial copy and see if she or he likes it.

If yes then you can set up a template that your client can update and publish without outside help.

[pauland]

I agree with Gary. Anyone planning to edit raw HTML is going to find Xaras generated output to be very difficullt to work with and this will be a big problem for you. Xaras HTML code generation is quite differrent to what HTML code developers expect.

[StevenWWinters]

He has stated this: "I basically will need it set up in shtml so that its easy to add links to the navigation bar without going through tons of files."

If you were to use SHTML with Webdesigner, I believe you would have to place that specific code in placeholders and the html files would need to be renamed with a .shtml extension. If you were to design the pages such that all changes by your client were done only in the included files rather than the Webdesigner generated files, perhaps it could work for you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes

[slavelle]

Or you could use one of the many methods stated around this forum for getting customer created content in the site "after the fact", using things like cushy CMS, Wordpress.org blog embedding, Google Docs inclusion, etc.

But when it comes to the menus and navigation and such, Xara quickly becomes "unfriendly". Mostly because proper integration of the menus is required to allow for dynamic changes and to get a menu in Xara that the customer could update would require it to be a seperate menu system living in an iframe or something, which wouldn't work very well and would create more work than it would eliminate.

In other words, in my opinion, whatever you'd save upfront in getting the site coded by doing so by using Xara, you'll lose in how difficult it will be for them (or you) to maintain in the future). My option in these cases is to design (and prototype) in Xara, and then use Joomla (with the JAT3 framework, for what it's worth) to build the template from scratch according to the design and the exported graphics from Xara.

Hope that helps in some way.