Yahoo SiteBuilder questions (or general website building)

Factual Questions
1

I’m trying to build a website for someone; although I have been in IT for many years, websites are something I just haven’t had any experience in building or maintaining. I’d like to know if a couple of things are possible in Yahoo Sitebuilder, and if not, what I need to do to get quickly up to speed in a more professional appearing alternative. It’s not like I can’t learn another programming language, after all.

First, does YSB allow you to create a completely customizable navigation bar? There are generic ones available on their site, but they, and indeed all their templates positively scream “cookie-cutter” and “amateur”. A lot of them look like they are more suited to sharing pictures of the baby than for creating an impressive online presence for a small business. At the same time, the template saves you the hassle of maintaining a consistent arrangement across all the pages of your website, and the generic navigation bar utility lets you propagate it across all the pages.

But I would like to have a navigation bar that has two features: (1), it’s completely custom. I don’t want to just choose whether it’s horizontal or vertical. I want to have a pleasing picture of a garden path, with stepping stones, and let the user click on the stones to navigate, and (2) I want to be able to propagate this arrangement through all the pages. I can certainly do the stepping stone links on a page, but is there a way to get SiteBuilder to treat it as a set of links that can be duplicated from page to page?

2

Go here:

Dynamic Drive

They have tons of scripts, forums and CSS, JavaScript, PHP anything you want.

They’re pretty helpful. J

3

Can you tell by looking at the stones where they link to?

Mystery meat navigation.

4

Sure, because the actual link is an ordinary text box that says “About Us”, or “Next” or what have you. I’ve just superimposed the links on a picture of a garden path. I hadn’t thought about making the stones themselves into buttons, but that would be cool. I’ll save it for Version 2.0.

5

Thanks for the link. I was interested, though not surprised, to see that official movie websites prominently mentioned, because I have yet to see one that isn’t absolutely atrocious in this regard. It seems that however much I just want to read a synopsis and watch a trailer, it’s impossible. I just can’t find them.

I end up wandering around from one slow-loading, resource-hogging page to another, and then give up in disgust. And this is in a computer with plenty of memory and processing power. Whatever the average level of computing power is that people have in their machines, the dedicated single-film websites always seem to overload it.

6

You’re welcome, your OP made it sound like you were using just the stones. Glad to see you have more sense than most professional web designers.

I don’t even try movie sites, I think they’re loaded with Flash and every “cool” trick some idiot can cram in.