Leaving XWD Because of Immense Frustration

[pauland]

I do think however, that this illustrates the point suzzie1234 orginally made about there being so many steps.

Quite right, but this is a really old-fasioned way to navigate and you'll struggle to find any major website using menus like that - for good reason.

[Boy]

Great job, Curtis. You must now have a complete grasp of layers and multi-level menus!

I hope that upcoming versions of XWD and Xtreme will contain the right (easy) tools to add levels to a menu. Despite the fact that multi-level menus have become less popular, there is still a need/use for them and sometimes they are preferable over a secondary menu (e.g., in the case of only two or three links).

[cursor]

You can have the similar access to a multi-page website, but without the complexity of popup layers (each with their own rollover layers). The attached example has the same eight top level buttons, and there is the same number of sub choices. In this case, however, only the MouseOff and MouseOver layers are used for navigation ... MUCH simpler.

but this is a really old-fasioned way to navigate and you'll struggle to find any major website using menus like that.

What formats are currently recognized as modern/evolved and efficient, Paul (or anyone else, for that matter).
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[pauland]

You can have the similar access to a multi-page website, but without the complexity of popup layers (each with their own rollover layers). The attached example has the same eight top level buttons, and there is the same number of sub choices. In this case, however, only the MouseOff and MouseOver layers are used for navigation ... MUCH simpler.

What formats are currently recognized as modern/evolved and efficient, Paul (or anyone else, for that matter).
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A common approach is to have a button bar with secondary choices that may appear horizontally under it or vertically on the left. It's possible to extend this to a third level with the left hand vertical buttons.

If you need to go deeper, then think carefully about the organisation.

As with all things, there's no guidelines that can't be broken. The really innovative sites turn this stuff on it's head.

[ss-kalm]

Lots of people are complaining that this is much too much work ........ What are the alternatives? Do any of the standard web packages have a feature to simplify this? I'm asking because I have never seen any package that can create these complex drop down menu's on the fly, especially since the end users will probably need custom colours.

[cursor]

With respect to improved implementation of navbars, note that covoxer (in April) indicated that "we are planing to add this feature in the following version." reference

I'm not sure when that will be, however.

[akubbeng]

Lots of people are complaining that this is much too much work ........ What are the alternatives?

Well Keith, as we know Xara's own Menu Maker can do the job.

Create your multi-level menu in there and paste the code into your Web Designer web page. This cheap ($24.99 US) and fast option was already suggested several times on the forum and could be of interest for some.
At least until Web Designer will have this - or similar - functionality integrated, as referred to by Cursor and others.

By the way, appreciate your time and energy in creating this tutorial, Cursor.

[w00dy]

Try placeholders and Easy Button & Menu Creator (www.blumentals.net) ... I really do like Web Designer .... after using Xtreme, there is a minimal learning curve but I am not making hard work of it.