directory tree for domain to display as navigation?

Factual Questions
1

I’m putting together a new website. I want to put up the content in a navigatable way quickly, as just that will take a lot of work, and go back and design it nicely later.

My idea is to set it up like the tree in Windows Explorer. On the left iframe, I would have the navigation with a list of the directories, which you could then click on to unfold. Click on the “Animations” directory and a list of animations with a short description of each appears. Clicking on any one of the list should cause the content to appear in the right hand iframe.

How would I do this? It seems like something that might already exist to be plugged into a site. In the past, I’ve just linked to a dir if all I wanted was to give someone a series of pictures or something. But that doesn’t work for an entire site. Hence, organizing by different directories and attaching descriptions.

This is assuming I have my own webspace/domain, which I have to buy now that my old one expired. Please keep in mind that I know little about websites because I just teach myself whatever I have to know to get by as I go along. Any help is appreciated, thanks.

2

I suggest you start here.

And don’t use frames of any kind.

3

I would suggest avoiding frames for navigation, too.

Try using Server Side Includes (Google “SSI” or “Server side includes”) instead. One file for your nav, included on all pages. Make one file, edit one file, display on all pages.

As for trees, there’s lots of cut-and-paste code out there to make them, either by using a file that defines the nodes or even using info from the file system that automatically creates them. Although if you want to include more than file names (Animations.html) and add stuff like descriptions, you’re going to need a definition of what to display that is hard-coded (or dynamic from a database).

Figure out what language you want to use (Javascript, PHP, XML, Perl, ASP, etc) and then look around on the Web for code to use.