Hello everyone!
I would like to pick your brains, or hear your opinions, on a difficulty I am experiencing building a website with Xara Web Designer 9 Premium. If you want to read a small introducion first, just continue reading. Otherwise jump to “What is the problem”
Introduction
As a newbie Xara Web Designer 9 Premium user, but otherwise with some considerable IT expertise and experience (albeit just a little where it concerns webdesign and development) I am currently updating and modernizing an old site of us (me and my better half). For this I selected, after a lot of Googling and pondering, Xara Web Designer 9 Premium. Main considerations, among many, were the favourable impression I got from the material on the Xara site, some positive reviews, the fact that Xara has a long trackrecord implying that it at least somewhat knows what its doing, and of course the quite reasonable price.
And, happy to say, two to three weeks into my project, I am not disappointed.
Still, all is not well. Let me describe the site I'm making first. It will be about our company, which is offering dogsled tours to tourists, with our pack of huskies, in the middle of Sweden. The site will give information about what we offer, hopefully promoting it too. Lots of visual material of course and factual information.
The site will be in three languages (possibly four) and each language version will have about twelve to fifteen pages. Some short ones, some a bit longer. We already have a site, but that definitely needs modernizing.
Looking for inspiration I was attracted to the Landcapes theme that is included with the Xara product. Not the visual aspects of the template, but the way in which the Products page of that template is constructed.
It looks like this: Like all pages in the template it has a header with a horizonal navigation bar to move through the site just below it. Below that is, on the left side, a vertical navigation bar with a button for each product and on the right side, a short introduction to the products in general. Pressing a button on the vertical navbar results in, on the right side, detailed info on the selected products, overlaying the previous info there.
I think it looks wonderful and it covers our needs, presenting info on the different types of tours we offer very nicely.
What is the problem?
The template page works by having pop-up layers (one per product) appear on the righthand side of the lower part of the page, triggered by pressing on of the buttons of the navbar left.
I got into trouble trying to implement this however. After experiencing two problems, which are not really relevant to what I want to tell here but where I was helped out in an impressively clear and fast way by Acorn on this forum (thanks again Acorn!), I ran into what I feel to be a limitiation of what I can do with layers in Xara Web Designer.
As implemented in the template, every pop-up layer closes automatically. In practice this means that focus returnes to the main page (i.e. The MouseOff layer) as soon as you do anything with the mouse, resulting in the info disappearing again. A bit too strongly put perhaps, but for instance using a vertical scrollbar is often enough to do the trick. Even just clicking -on the popup layer itself- is enough to make it disappear. Definitely not workeable for our purposes, alas.
On the other hand, setting to popup layers to NOT automatically close has two different negative effects.
First, admittedly just a minor thing which I could live with, this creates a small button in the righthand top of the popup layer to enable manual closing. Well, not too bad.
Secondly however, if a user ignores this close button and just selects a new item to view (a new popup layer) to overlay the previous one, things go south fast. In Web Designer these popup layers have a fixed order. This means that when you have select a layer highup, and then select one below that, the latter one will not become visible, being obscured by the higher one.
Using the close button, of course, will prevent this.
But this is, in my humble opinion, not a natural thing to do. If there is a menu one just should be able to select items without bothering to close other things first. I am certain that the general user will get confused and that wont be favourable to their impression of our site.
Now, knowing a bit about HTML and CSS, I realize that what I want is technically not hard. Lets say you have 10 different popup layers, just assign z-values of (lets say) 12,14..., 28, 30 to them. When a popup-layer is requested, change the z value to 255 and up it comes. When another is requested, restore the z to its previous value and set the z of the new layer to 255. And so on.
Now there is no way, unless I am very stupid, to do this in Web Designer. And one of the reasons that I decided to use this product was exactly to avoid digging around in HTML, Javascript and the like.... I want to keep it sort of high level!
I see only two alternatives:
First.... forget the popup layers and using plain old pages for each product. Being careful with the layout we can achieve almost the same visual effect. But not completely.... And these popup layers looked so nice.... damn!
Second : I can use iframes. Defining a region of my page to show another page in.... that last page would correspond to the layer. Should work.
However, I seem to remember that people frowned upon the use of iframes. And, even worse, I cant seem to figure out how I can get that running in Web Designer. Tried defining a rectangled shape, naming it, and linking something to that name. But that doesnt work
At last... what do I want to know from all you out there?
One: Am I being stupid and is, what I want, doable in Web Designer 9? If so, how?
Two: Am I overlooking something, or other alternative solutions?
Three: How do I get iframes to work in Web Designer 9?
Thank you for taking the time to read all this, and even more thanks if you take the trouble to reply!
Cheers, Leo
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