Is a complex of sites a misuse of XD?

[shaun2000]

I fear being a fool rushing in where techies wear galoshes. I plan to use WD for a family of five travel guides. I expect to have to use about 18 live WD files to maintain about 50 scattered pages, and be outputting about 100 pages from 3 database-page-generating systems. These systems would combine components making up a base XWD htm page that uses absolute links to reference a single central graphics folder.

My base architecture is at www.nycgetaways.com/redesign.

Is this absolutely a bad idea? My reasons are to give designers greater freedom to frolic, and to use XWD's superb drop shadow capability. My page menu will be in a tab panel to the left. Links there bring up alternate content in the panel to the right. That content I plan to style using a central style sheet, dropping it styled into a placeholder. Very cumbersome, but I expect Xara to extend WD's capability to make all this easier with time.

Words of caution will be heeded.

[covoxer]

Well, you'll have to play a lot with placeholders.
Remember: if you have a dynamic content that can become longer than a placeholder is, use scrolling.
As far as I know, WD or XXP4 were never used in this kind of project. If you decide to build it, and succeed, your experience may be very valuable for the WD community.

If you'll need any assistance, I'll be glad to help you.

[remi]

The main problem would be, that Xara Web Designers exported HTML is not usable for pages with dynamic lengths. For example if you don't know how much hotels a search will get, websites generated with Xara Web Designer will not be able to adjust their page sizes (in this case the length of your page) to your flexible needs. It's a well known drawback of the used absolute position approach.

If you don't need such flexible layouts, then Xara Web Designer will be worth a try.

Remi

[shaun2000]

I had a nightmare last night about designing my sites in WD. Then on visiting this board I see I must have sleepwalked and written a post to this board.

Thank heavens it was only a bad dream. Sorry to have bothered you.

[Spinny]

Two words: scroll bar.

Two more: thank you.

[shaun2000]

John, I would appreciate help.

I realize that I can combine WD with Dreamweaver (I actually use Namo Web Editor) if in my web editor, for less-designed pages, I can propagate my background tile from the center of the window as XWD does instead of from the left edge. I tried patching code together from XWD's default page and roe.js but cannot figure it out. Can you help me with a body-code/javascript combination that will accomplish that (propagating the background tile from the center)?

Then it would be possible to use XWD for primary high-traffic pages where the most design freedom is needed and a format achieving the same architecture-look in a web editor for the remaining pages where that is more appropriate.

If we could start like this, I can imagine the use of WD spreading over our sites as designers demand the freedom it gives.

[Scotty]

Hi,
I may be putting my "foot in my mouth" again, but why break the habit.
I am currently trying to design a website to be used as a base for a 'Forum". I posted a link in the "post your site" thread for an idea of what I have done.
As was mentioned WD is not 'advanced" enough to handle the back end scripts for dynamic sites. (correct me if I am wrong).
My project now is to 'slice' what i have designed intoo sliced objects..and possibly have the forum adminstrater use the slices within his coding.
Jim

[WillieN]

I also use Namo and am looking at ways of combining the strengths of both applications.

[shaun2000]

I see Dreamweaver as too complex and controlling, for example by automatically assigning numbered styles. I saw my wife struggle mightily with it and eventually give up.

Suppposedly use of Dreamweaver is widespread enough that any web designer can use it. But I wonder if it isn't quicker in the long run to get designers to learn Namo and Xara WD than to lean on their existing knowledge of Dreamweaver and integration with other design programs.

In my base architecture page in WD I placed placeholders with <div>label</div> tags where I would want content. Opening the html page it generated in Namo I was able to identify easily the two divs. By pouring html code into these divs I got perfect pages. I had made the page deep enough to fit any likely content, and felt the blank space left at the foot of the page was acceptable. People will just stop scrolling when they reach the end of the content. The point was to use the coding generated by WD to create the architecture without needing separate coding.

In the htm file generated by WD there's a link to the associated graphic folder. I assumed I could put that folder anywhere, use an absolute link to the folder in the htm file and then place copies of that file anywhere--it would still find its graphics and script files etc. I didn't test this plan, a ".lock" file suddenly appeared and seemed to scupper my experiments.

Given the enthusiasm greeting WD I expect it will be extended to make uses like this easier.

Namo often gives me hard "&nbsp;" spaces for regular spaces in text. Know of a fix?

[shaun2000]

John, I have discovered the style background-position: center