frames

[mattguitar77]

Hello,

I have just recently purchased Actinic Developer and am starting my first e-commerce site for a catering firm.

They basically want frames in their site and will not have it without frames.

My main problem is that they want around 12 buttons on the left hand frame bar as a constant bar. I can insert my own buttons into the primary template page, but.....How on earth do I link the buttons to the correct pages?

What I mean exactly is that I have a home page, with a simple link to the online catalogue, then a series of image thumbnails, such as Cooker, Microwave, etc - I noticed that when you select Cooker for example the html page name stays the same, even though the content changes into the page containing all the cookers.

Its very frustrating and my client is getting quite upset now, I'll have to call Actinic as well, so if anyone can help I would be very grateful!

Thankyou

Matt

[NormanRouxel]

You probably won't find many people here who know a lot about using Actinic within a Framed site as it's such a bad idea.

I'm sure that you've told your client that they'll be making it really difficult for search engines to find their products. If they prefer their competitors to be better listed and easier found who can stop them.

Another pain (as you've found out) is that there will be no way to publish links to a single specific page. Everyone will have to go to the home page and make their way to the particular page by clicking down the tree.

Anyway Actinic does have a few Framed themes and Design / Options / Miscellaneous has 2 checkboxes under Generation Options that may be worth investigating. See what the tooltip has to say.

[mattguitar77]

frames

Hi Norman,

Thanks for the reply, yes I should stress to the client about the search engine problems.

The trouble is that the client is telling me that there is no compromise, which makes it difficult.

I have tried the 2 checkboxes that you mention already. The problem I have is that there are 12 custom buttons that make-up the product links in the left-hand frame. I just can't figure-out how to make these link up correctly. So that when the button is clicked the right page is displayed in the main area

I even tried to create my own frames in dreamweaver and put them into the actinic code in the templates, but I am getting confussed as actinic has its own code generated, in the form of netquotevars.

Well I'll be calling actinic to see what they can do, but thanks again!

Matt

[leehack]

Hi Matt

May not help but will tell you anyway.

When you click on a link within a frame and you want the outcome to load in a different frame, (i.e. navigation button in left frame which when clicked changes the main frame to the selection chosen.), then you need to state the destination frame.

[Duncan Rounding]

There's not a lot you can do about this and I think this may only be the tip of the iceberg with possible further problems down the road...

What you are mentioning regarding page names etc are typical issues that you will have with frames.
As you are probably aware you can have links in one frame that will load a specified html page into another frame - standard html coding, like this in a one frame loading something else into another:
<a href="link.htm" target="mainFrame">link</a>
- but the page name will of course stay the same - because it is still the same page.
It seems you have a very stubborn client who does not understand the disadvantages of frames, yet thinks they do by insisting that they must have them. You will need some good communication skills and some documented research from the web to talk them around I think.

Let's hope the client doesn't blame you for bad search engine rankings later...

Duncan R