I am re-designing a website which currently makes use of Frames. (I want to replace them with something more convenient.)
It has a layout page, a menus frame and content frame for various content pages (also a links frame.)
What I want to do is make the site completely dynamic. As in, I want to keep the layout, content, menu and links areas in separate files so that updating is easy. Or at least separate the layout from the content so that changing it only needs to be done on one page
Here is an image to make the layout clearer:
http://img520.imageshack.us/img520/4465/layoutic8.gif
I looked into using PHP, made an index page and menus.php include page and put divs instead of Frames, but it all started to look too uncessecarily complicated using an IF/Case statment with the GET variable function.
Plus, it requires a page refresh before any content is even loaded...
The problem was with using includes, I would need to repeat the layout code with the content.
I require a situation that when the user clicks a menu in the menus div the content would be produced for the right page in the content div. (Almost like an Ajax application yet possibly with a page refresh.) The menus area could even be on the same page as the layout.
I read in a search that Javascript was a better way to achieve this. I can't really use Ajax though, the host does not support it.
I am really surprised that I cannot not find a more benifitial way to do this without Frames...
If anyone can suggest how I can achieve this it would be gladly appreciated.
I hope if anyone can provide an answer, this will come up in a search if people are looking for similar things too.