please help, beginner html coder

[ragdoll]

Hi,

I have been impressed with the level of knowledge on this site and feel someone may be able to help me. I have a site operational www.barkerbakes.co.uk which I wrote in html (am only self taught) but has been 'improved' with Xara webstyle 3 then 4 and have just bought webdesigner, But am dismayed on the difficulty of menu design in the latest package, also doesn't seem to allow variable width pages, which I use on my website for greater flexibility. Anyone got any solutions? I think I will have to go back to webstyle 4 and continue to cobble pages together with that and html etc.
Any suggestions welcome.

[Ross Macintosh]

Hi - I don't know if I can be much help. I visited your site and was very impressed by all the great work the bakery does. I like how comprehensive the web site is --- makes me want to buy from the bakery.

As you note the existing site uses the variable width approach. Xara-WD, as a WYSIWYG design tool, doesn't use a variable width approach as doing so conflicts with the WYSIWYG principle. Generally speaking I'd suggest Xara-WD isn't suited to maintaining your particular site. That isn't to say it can't be useful to you and I think you could make good use of it. You can use it to make content for putting in some of your frames.

When you are inclined to do a site makeover you could do it completely in Xara-WD if you wanted. It would be relatively easy as you have the content already in the existing site and there could be lots of cutting and pasting. Now is probably not the time for that (as it isn't necessary) but when you do want a makeover, Xara-WD would be a highly flexible tool. If you want to think about makeovers, check out the templates - looking more at the information layouts than the template colours & graphics. The colour & graphics can be changed easily. Should you ever rebuild the site in Xara-WD I think you'd then find it an easy tool to keep it maintained and grow the site.

Regards, Ross

[Jimi King]

I've been designing webpages for around 14 years now and I'd respectfully suggest that now more than ever is the time to move away from variable width pages.

With the ever expanding variety of resolutions and widescreen monitors, variable width pages can begin to look very odd at some resolutions. That said, the most widely used setting is still 1024x768, therefore because of the use of sidebars for history etc. somewhere in the 800 to 900 pixels area is probably the most versatile width to go for.