Sorry if this is a bit long-- it's a bit hard for me to describe my problem clearly--
I'm having a lot of trouble with figuring out how to layout a website to meet certain needs. I'm a bit stumped because what I'm looking to do seems to be what so many other websites out there do already, but yet I can't seem to find any good resources/info about how they achieve it.
From researching a bit-- it doesn't seem that there are tooooo many ways to go about laying out a site. You can definitely add to this if you know of anything different but this is what I came up with:
1. You can have a very basic site just using basic html
2. You can still have a basic html site but have more flexibility with the placement of certain things if you use CSS
3. You can design the page in Photoshop, and slice the images to put in a table.
From looking at a whole bunch of professional websites and the complexity of the graphic design and layout, it seems like they must be using some variation of #3, the graphic slicing.
Anyway the design I'm working with has been sliced with imageready- there is a slice for the logo, slices for each of the links, as well as a content area slice. When done in this way, when a user clicks on a link-- new information can be displayed in the content area by having the link simply swap the "contentarea.jpg" image with "specialnews.jpg"-- which is an image with the news permenently part of the image itself. The idea of not having to reload the entire page to change just a specific content area seems to be exactly what I'm looking for.
Here's the problem.
Much of the information that will be in the content section-- will not be static information that can be typed out before hand in Photoshop and saved as an image for swapping. The information that will need to be displayed will be generated from php code.
Example: "This week's current price of the chocolate flavor is..." and then the price would be read from the database.
Using the slices method, how can you get php code to be displayed in specific content area? Before with static information, you'd swap one image for another. Do you see where the problem is?
It's just a bit frustrating because I can program the php code without much issue now, I can create a nice design, but I can't find any information on how the heck to put the two together! I realize there are a lot of variations in the methods that people use-- but it seems that having dynamic info displayed on a page that uses slices is the norm when it comes to professional websites--- I just can't find any information on how the heck they do it.
Sites like:
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore Seems that the site is made from slices-- but you see how the prices are under the items? I'm sure those prices aren't permenently 'stamped' into an image--- I'm sure they just update their database and the prices on all of their webpages would change--- how are they incorporating something dynamic like that in the middle of their sliced page?
