web design course in london - Dropdown menu's

Hi Jo,

I can understand your frustration.

I should have mentioned: make sure you back-up your web site files before trying stuff, that way you can always get back to where you were. You may be able to get them back off your web server if you uploaded them.

This is Adobe's explanation and I reckon it's to do with the fact that templates are files located in your local site. They don't get uploaded to your web server, they are just used to maintain your local files.

When you update and save a template in Dreamweaver, it prompts you go through all files that use the template and update them too. It does this by looking at the code in each web page and compares/updates the differences of the newly saved template.

Sometimes you get problems if files are stored in different locations. Say, for example, you have a /product folder with 2 HTML files, widget.html and foobar.html. From the template's point of view, to link to any file in the product folder, it has to go BACK out of the template folder, and then into the product folder, like this: ../product/widget.html

Whereas, a link on /index.html would only need to point to /product/widget.html. Furthermore, a link from widget.html to foobar.html would simply just link to foobar.html, because they are in the same folder. This is called relative linking. And because Dreamweaver uses a bunch of javascript functions to display your drop-down menus, "Dreamweaver cannot parse and update document relative links within the mmLoadMenus() function when the page is saved to a different location."

There may be hope for you. Do you know about the Modify -> Template -> Apply Template To Page command? You can use this on a page to switch between which template it uses. So if you get a template perfect, try applying it to your other pages. As far as creating new files based on the template, but the dropdowns not working, try saving the file in different locations. Perhaps in the root, then try a folder to see the different effects.

Alternatively, if you don't mind about your site structure and can have all your pages in one folder (directory) then this may make things easier for the drop-down functions.

Or, you could just leave out the drop-downs altogether. How many pages are there? If it's just a few items in each menu, you may be better off showing all of the items at once down the side of the page, for example.

I hope this helps. Let me know how you get on.

Rich