Questions

[j4]

Questions (mixed bag). Will swap for answers. All reasonable offers considered.

Glastonbury:

My mum is planning on going to Glastonbury. She's phoning me tonight (before ticket o'clock!) to ask about stuff. I'm worried that if I tell her the horrid bits (toilets, not being able to sleep EVER, etc.) she'll feel I'm trying to put her off going because I'm embarrassed about having parents there, but if I don't tell her, she'll be miserable when she's there. What do you reckon I should tell her?

Church:

The other day I got a mailshot from a church I used to go to. God knows (ha!) why they're sending me the 2002-03 newsletter, but anyway: they've included a "Do you want to stay on our mailing list?" card, and I definitely don't want to stay on their mailing list, but I'm wondering whether I should try to tell them why.

Sewing:

I want to learn the basics of sewing with a sewing machine. I have a very old hand-cranked sewing machine, and ideally I'd like to learn to use that -- a) because I already own it so I wouldn't have to buy one, and b) it's not as scary as electric ones. Would anybody be willing to teach me the very basic basics if I came round with a sewing machine? Will buy beer/food/etc. in return.

Web design:

Or, "Do my job for me". But seriously: I want to do some pages with tabbed sections, but with the tabs down the side of the page, displaying the sidebar menu for that section when that tab is selected (if that makes sense). What I'm looking for is examples where somebody else has already done this well, so I can a) convince people that it'll work, and b) get an idea of how to do it neatly.

Comments

[j4.livejournal.com]

Tell her that the icky bits *exist* - although she'll surely have a fair idea that they do already, won't she?

Well, I dunno... she's never been before. And I usually just rave about the good bits.

Web design

Entirely-CSS would be nice. But accessibility is paramount... we're aiming for triple-A on everything, which is hard. And this is for the prospectus, & it's even more important there because it's so outward-facing.

It's not so much the techy how-to-do-it as the design how-to-do it, really, though -- how to make the tabs big enough that you can read them, but small enough that they don't take up too much space on the screen (though the ones we have at the moment [look! (http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/univ/gsprospectus/)] are huuuuge, and stupid). I can sort of see in my head how it's supposed to look, but I can't quite see how it'll all [waves hands] fit together. Hence wanting example-ish things. I know this sounds stupid and clueless, but I'm not really a web designer, I live in fear that my employers will realise this any day now... :) I was employed as web-editorial-thingy rather than l337 HTML guru, though, but I don't think anybody else cares enough about this particular bit of the web to do the design nicely, because the Design department "don't do web stuff" (they're paper-design only) and the web team "don't do design". (Grrrrrrrr.)

Rambling, sorry.

The simplest way to do it would be to create a little menu-template for each section and copy+paste into the relevant pages, but this really only works if you're not going to be adding things all the time - otherwise Too Much Work.

Well, we're using a content-managing system that lets us divorce header/footer/sidebar/etc. bits of template from each other and dynamically serve pages which are scrunched together [waves hands non-technically] from all those component parts. So we'd theoretically only have to do it once. Maybe.

Depends some on what you're making the pages with, though. What are you using to create and edit?

I tend to just use emacs for simple stuff (since I'm only doing the content bits -- see above), and Homesite for other stuff. But then I don't usually do anything very complicated.

We're getting Dreamweaver (in fact, we're getting the whole Macromedia shebang, Flash/Fireworks/etc., hurrah!) soon... everybody says "no no Dreamweaver is evil" so we're buying it in the spirit of "know your enemy", but it might be useful... we'll see.

[marnameow.livejournal.com]

Well, we're using a content-managing system that lets us divorce header/footer/sidebar/etc. bits of template from each other and dynamically serve pages which are scrunched together [waves hands non-technically] from all those component parts.


Is it possible to apply different side-bars to different sections of the site? If you can do it that way then you should be able to create a sidebars for each section of the site, with the other sections collapsed and the current section open.

The CMS might well be able to do this automagically, though. Can you find someone and prod them about it, do you think?

Are you looking for something like this:

http;//www.marna.org/sidebar.gif

It could be easily made to expand to another level, and made *much smaller* as well.

Dreamweaver's very good at some things - I use it quite a bit, for mananging several-hundred-page sites and things like that. And I find fireworks very nifty for creating web graphics in a hurry.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Hm, right. Finally got round to looking at some of this.

Different-sidebars-for-different-sections is easy enough in Mason, it's just a question of telling it where to look for the sidebar for each section.

Your tabs look quite neat, but... one of the things I like about the tabs as they are currently is that they look like tabs; that is, one of them is "in front of" the others. I think that's a useful visual metaphor, it makes it easy to see at a glance which section you're in. I was trying to do that sideways -- think A4 ring-binder with section dividers.

Maybe the reason nobody's done this is that it's a really bad idea...?

Dreamweaver -- don't you find (this seems to be the prevailing view) that it sticks in lots of Stuff that you don't want?