Designer Pro X: Navbar jumps to right on page change, then re-centers...why?

[jonstrong]

The assets on the mouse-off layers are fine. It's just a matter of rebuilding the basic template Jon. Hope this help

Tremendous help - thanks so much! I really appreciate the time and effort you've put into this. I'll have at it this evening (until my family drags me away from my laptop) and tomorrow. Looks far more direct and straightforward than what I was doing.

Much appreciated!

[jonstrong]

So - with your walk through, somehow the fog in my head cleared, and I attacked the site with renewed vigor... I didn't start from scratch and copy all the content over -- but I thought I'd take a chance and clean up what I had built, and it all worked out perfectly. Here's what I wound up doing:

First - following Roly's suggestion, I shut down and restarted Designer Pro using Admin privileges, just in case anything weird was happening.

Next: I cleaned up the header and footer items per your suggestions: I got rid of all the extraneous rectangles, and only created a single one to place behind the navbar: same size and position as the navbar, but set to stretch across the width and tile.

I set the header and footer banner rectangles the same way: only the width of the navbar, sticky, stretch to width (and tile).

I got rid of ALL the extraneous garbage in the background and pasteboard layers.

I turned off "repeating" for all the header and footer items (temporarily). Then I went to each other page, and deleted any leftover items in the header, footer, background and pasteboard. I also located and eliminated all the extraneous rectangles that had somehow wound up on various pages in the mouseoff layer.

Once all the old garbage was gone, I went back to the home / index page, reset the header and footer items to repeat on all pages. Last step: go to each page and adjust the page length.

And...that was it! Vastly simplified, and it appears that everything is working as it should.

I still have some editing and new content to create, but this is a big milestone. Thanks to help from you, Roly, Gary, etc., it really does seem like the fog has lifted. I still have a load to learn, but what I've been doing is no longer a mystery.

Thanks so much!

You can see the latest at: http:new.stronggroup.com/mpartnersltd

I'm also attaching the revised XAR file in case anyone is curious about the innards. Much cleaner now!

[jonstrong]

BTW: I also took Egg's advice and adjusted the Services menu: since this has a drop-down, I took away the navigation to the Service overview page in the on-click event of the top level Services button, and added a "services overview" choice in the drop-down menu (which I guess is really a pop-up, while still being a drop-down... ). This works nicely, and precludes issues if somebody is navigating on a touchscreen device or tablet. BUT: the way the navbar is coded, the highlight of the menu items is a bit borked: The navbar normally highlights the button text corresponding to the page that's being displayed. But this doesn't happen now for the Services overview -- since you now get to the overview view a drop-down menu option, not the top level Services button. Not a killer...but it would be nice to figure out a fix without having to dismantle the navbar too much, or create a unique - non-repeating version for just this page.

ideas?

Jon

[Egg Bramhill]

Well done Jon! The sub-menu lack of highlight is an occasional gripe. You could place a highlighter above the button that's selected (it has to be above otherwise it overlays the drop-down menu) and it needs to be sticky to show above the stretchy bars. You'll need to paste in place on every Services sub page. Then do the same for the other buttons but reposition it under the correct button.

[roly]

Hi Jon, I have modified the text for services in the navbar, this is a little more discrete way of highlighting, I have used this method a couple of times in the past. What I did is added text from the webdings character map in front and after services. This is an alternative to Egg's highlight.

Ciao

Roly

[jonstrong]

Egg, Roly - thank you both. Looks like I have a few options to accomplish the highlight. I may share both with my colleagues and solicit opinions...although it may be wiser for me to just decide and tell them, "that's that way it has to be...".

I'll play with these tomorrow (already been quite a long day today!).

Jon

[Egg Bramhill]

And a further alternative - I'm not a lover of this trend to have large headers & I must admit I thought I was doing something wrong at first looking at your services pages as there was virtually nothing changing 'above the fold'. Much of the top content of the page remained the same.

So I thought how about making the services text into the sub-menu. The Services button now just opens the services page, the services button remains highlighted and all the services pages are served up om pop-ups. (well only three in my example)

I used your text to create the buttons and for a reason that escapes me these buttons, although grouped, still act as text type links, the underlying rectangles aren't firing the mouse over effect, but that's easily overcome by rebuilding the buttons.

I feel there's more of a definite change in my example, but that's for you to decide