Designer Pro X: Navbar jumps to right on page change, then re-centers...why?

[Egg Bramhill]

There's a lot of strange things going on here, with page background rectangles oddly placed and many repeating rectangles on both the pasteboard background and page background, any of which could be causing the offset/reset.

[jonstrong]

Thx Egg -- I was chuckling watching the video, seeing how badly the project is mangled!

Due in some part to me being a very occasional user, working from a template without knowing how it was constructed (or taking the time to look closely at it), and only having a very superficial knowledge of items like repeating groups, sticky / stretchy items, etc. I think I also rushed into trying to apply band-aid solutions to issues I ran into, without really understanding the real cause, and without appreciating the side effects of what I was doing. I didn't think, though, that I had dropped so many random rectangles on the various pages -- that's just strange... Guessing again that it was a side effect of whatever I thought I *was* doing.

One thing I found very strange: if you look at the navbar itself, make sure it's set as sticky / top, when scrolling down the page, it appears that there's no background to the navbar to fill in the blank space between the buttons, so the background of the page appears in these spaces during scroll. That's why I had put in a 40px high rectangle immediately behind the navbar (the one you changed to be stretch to page width). Seeing that was what started to lead me down the dangerous path of creating all those extra rectangles!

Last thought: started trying rectangles on the page background and pasteboard layers when I saw white flashing in the browser (only Chrome, though -- looked fine in Edge and IE and Firefox) -- thinking that perhaps these layers were display first, briefly, before subsequent layers with the top and bottom banners (e.g., mouseoff) were drawn.

Your advice is sound -- I hesitated trying to start all over, but I think I may be wasting more time trying to fix this version than simply creating a new clean one.

Assuming I get my head on straight and make some progress, I'll share it here.

thanks again!

Jon

[roly]

Jon, weird things are happening with your Xara application as demonstrated by Egg's video, you might want to close your application and reopen it by right clicking on the app and run it as administrator. You only need to do this once and it often fixes weird behaviours in the app.

Ciao

Roly

[Egg Bramhill]

The assets on the mouse-off layers are fine. It's just a matter of rebuilding the basic template Jon. Hope this help

[jonstrong]

The assets on the mouse-off layers are fine. It's just a matter of rebuilding the basic template Jon. Hope this help

Tremendous help - thanks so much! I really appreciate the time and effort you've put into this. I'll have at it this evening (until my family drags me away from my laptop) and tomorrow. Looks far more direct and straightforward than what I was doing.

Much appreciated!

[jonstrong]

So - with your walk through, somehow the fog in my head cleared, and I attacked the site with renewed vigor... I didn't start from scratch and copy all the content over -- but I thought I'd take a chance and clean up what I had built, and it all worked out perfectly. Here's what I wound up doing:

First - following Roly's suggestion, I shut down and restarted Designer Pro using Admin privileges, just in case anything weird was happening.

Next: I cleaned up the header and footer items per your suggestions: I got rid of all the extraneous rectangles, and only created a single one to place behind the navbar: same size and position as the navbar, but set to stretch across the width and tile.

I set the header and footer banner rectangles the same way: only the width of the navbar, sticky, stretch to width (and tile).

I got rid of ALL the extraneous garbage in the background and pasteboard layers.

I turned off "repeating" for all the header and footer items (temporarily). Then I went to each other page, and deleted any leftover items in the header, footer, background and pasteboard. I also located and eliminated all the extraneous rectangles that had somehow wound up on various pages in the mouseoff layer.

Once all the old garbage was gone, I went back to the home / index page, reset the header and footer items to repeat on all pages. Last step: go to each page and adjust the page length.

And...that was it! Vastly simplified, and it appears that everything is working as it should.

I still have some editing and new content to create, but this is a big milestone. Thanks to help from you, Roly, Gary, etc., it really does seem like the fog has lifted. I still have a load to learn, but what I've been doing is no longer a mystery.

Thanks so much!

You can see the latest at: http:new.stronggroup.com/mpartnersltd

I'm also attaching the revised XAR file in case anyone is curious about the innards. Much cleaner now!

[jonstrong]

BTW: I also took Egg's advice and adjusted the Services menu: since this has a drop-down, I took away the navigation to the Service overview page in the on-click event of the top level Services button, and added a "services overview" choice in the drop-down menu (which I guess is really a pop-up, while still being a drop-down... ). This works nicely, and precludes issues if somebody is navigating on a touchscreen device or tablet. BUT: the way the navbar is coded, the highlight of the menu items is a bit borked: The navbar normally highlights the button text corresponding to the page that's being displayed. But this doesn't happen now for the Services overview -- since you now get to the overview view a drop-down menu option, not the top level Services button. Not a killer...but it would be nice to figure out a fix without having to dismantle the navbar too much, or create a unique - non-repeating version for just this page.

ideas?

Jon

[Egg Bramhill]

Well done Jon! The sub-menu lack of highlight is an occasional gripe. You could place a highlighter above the button that's selected (it has to be above otherwise it overlays the drop-down menu) and it needs to be sticky to show above the stretchy bars. You'll need to paste in place on every Services sub page. Then do the same for the other buttons but reposition it under the correct button.

[roly]

Hi Jon, I have modified the text for services in the navbar, this is a little more discrete way of highlighting, I have used this method a couple of times in the past. What I did is added text from the webdings character map in front and after services. This is an alternative to Egg's highlight.

Ciao

Roly

[jonstrong]

Egg, Roly - thank you both. Looks like I have a few options to accomplish the highlight. I may share both with my colleagues and solicit opinions...although it may be wiser for me to just decide and tell them, "that's that way it has to be...".

I'll play with these tomorrow (already been quite a long day today!).

Jon