content target

Report · Aug 02, 2009

Hello, your help would be appreciated.

I have a website where the header/footer are all the same but I have a list on the left hand side of the website in a div and when you click on one of the items I want the contents of that to be viewed in another div on the page (ie., without having to build a ton of pages or refreshing the entire screen everyday. The old days iframes took care of this quite nicely.

Menu here contents to be displayed over here.

For example I am rebuilding an old website see what I want if you click on one of the buttons running along the left....

http://www.onlinefinishingtouches.com/accessories.htm see how the contents goes into the right hand side without refreshing.

thanks

Report · Aug 02, 2009

spry

here

or here

(view source)

Report · Aug 02, 2009

What are you reasons for not wanting to build seperate pages? All of the common elements (menu, header, footer, etc) will be cached and if done correctly, will not appear to refresh. You can use server side includes to make page maintenance much easier. The other ways to have a page that doesn't need to refresh are to

1) Use a div and show and hide the content in the div. The disadvantage of this is you are making your pages huge so they will take a long time to load, and your visitors can't easily bookmark them. It also makes the pages more difficult to maintain.

2) Use ajax where content is dynamically fetched into the page from other pages or data sources. Ajax is great for interactive websites but I really believe it is overkill for a basic website.

The other way, is to use a single dynamic page that pulls content from a database/file system and have it refresh with the appropriate content based on a parameter passed to it.