I've been into webdesign for years, but up until this point I have always used frames or popups. I am making the late, and slightly painful, transition to using div layers. Before I do anything though, I want to make sure I understand the coding.

This is the page I have set up so far:
http://www.bluberri-shimmer.com/home.html

I want the menus on the right and left sides to be the same on every subpage. Do I have to post and change this entire code on every page every time I want to change my layout? I've always used external style sheets so I wouldn't have to do anything drastic like that, and it seems there should be a way to do this. I read something about includes and multiple style sheets in an earlier post. What are includes, and how would they help me?

Thanks to anyone who actually took the time to read all of that. :)

-Amy :read:

You have two sorts of includes. SSI and PHP to find more information about them see this page:

http://www.lissaexplains.com/html6.shtml

Also i would advice to not position from the right, because it might look good in your resolution, but if you change the browser window's width and height you see that the text will move out of order. People with bigger resolutions will see the image on it's place but the text far outside of it (not ligned up)

If you position everything from left and top it will guarantee you that it will look okay in every resolution :)

edit: on your page you forgot a closing > on the image:

<img src="header.gif">


Love,
Mirna

Thank you! I've heard about SSI and PHP.. for some reason I never saw them on this site, so I never had a clear understanding, so thanks! Is it possible to use both, since you have to change the file extension in both cases?

Also, thanks for the advice, and telling me about the mistake... That was a bit clumsy of me. :)

Amy :read:

I would say keep it on one, php or ssi otherwise things might get mixed up and not work. I'm not even sure it's possible, but both do the same thing.

with php you don't need to code in php, you can just use the php includes only and just use regular html with it if that's what you mean

edit: found this: http://www.zytrax.com/tech/php/php_ssi.htm
Love,
Mirna

Ok, I thought I had it, but when I made the seperate .txt file, it won't show up on my main page. Would someone check my coding?

Here's the url: http://www.bluberri-shimmer.com/home.shtml

-Amy :read:

change this...
<!--#include file="leftnav.txt"-->

into this...
<!--#include file="leftnav.txt" -->
(yes, there is a difference, the space after the quotes.)

or try this...
<!--#include virtual="leftnav.txt" -->

if those fail to still show the contents, try contacting your host for help. at this time, it does not look like they are parsing the command line for some reason.

Thanks, I guess I should have tried contacting them to begin with - I have to pay extra for SSI, PHP, and CGI, which makes sense, lol.

-Amy :read:

Thanks, I guess I should have tried contacting them to begin with
not necessarily.
many hosts provide these services free as a standard these days.
i guess it pays to read what is in each package deal though.
good luck!