how to put JUST the navbar in a site?

I have an entire website built in another product and need to get a nice site navigation bar into it.

How complicated is it to just get the navbar from Xara6 into an existing website.

I don't want to rebuild the entire site in Xara...

I have thought about possibly doing an include statement and just pull in the navbar...

problems
- they want a dropdown navbar (so, the navbar needs to dropdown over existing web text)
- I need the navbar to show which page you are on (highlighted button for each page)

It seems to me it might be easier to figure out how to do a drop down menu in your other program.

I think there would be a lot of coding involved to use your Xara nav bar.

What product did you use for the existing website?

the existing site is a purchased template that I am swapping in content for. The top half is flash and the menu included is not dropdown.

on the homepage the flash includes a slideshow - on the rest of the pages it does not. So, while it would be easy to add the dropdown menu in the home page where it has room to "dropdown" over the slideshow - it will not be so easy on the sub-pages where the flash header is only 100px high...

one solution I found is to split the flash header into two parts - (it currently consists of an animated logo, a menu and a slideshow - top to bottom).

I'm going to split it into two flash movies - the animated logo and the slideshow. I'll use the logo on all pages with the xara menu beneath it and on the homepage I'll use both movies with the xara menu between them...

I found that if I generate .htm pages with the menu I need I can include those in my .php pages and all works well. The dropdown generated from Xara floats above my content.

The only thing I can't get it to do is highlight the button based on which "page" it's on since xara is expecting it to be on page2.htm and it is really on page2.php pulling an include called page2.htm

It's not a perfect solution and if it was my site I would probably handcode it or do it another way, but this client is changing their mind every five minutes and Xara makes it a lot easier...

Be sure to keep tabs on your time and bill for changes. And let your client know up front you are billing for changes. It makes them more agreeable.

I am not sure if it would not be better to invest the time to recreate the site in Xara and then you will have everything under one roof. Some times you just have to bit the bullet and do it. It will make your life easier down the road. Only problem here is the time you spend will not be billable. But if you are clever you can find something else to bill for to make up. ;)

thanks - definitely keeping track of time...

Robert