Webpage layout concepts...

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Have you seen anything interesting?

I've been addicted to the nine-cell table layout for too long. I've caught myself designing and cutting border background bits when making a new site rather than designing a layout. Scary.

I used to do two divisions with the menu on the left and the content on the right. Did some frames before as well, but frames only on LAN where everyone had the same version of practically everything, so everything was bound to look the same.

I hate the portal layout - to me it looks the same on all pages and I keep thinking it must be PHP Nuke or PHP Portal or whatever such.

I also hate the very idea of making the whole site one big flash presentation. Evil.

I would hate adjusting pages to a specific resolution or giving them a fixed height and width, but then, since nowadays just about any browser loads it differently... visitors are bound to see crap when they open the page before maximising it.

Sure, I could put just about everything in document.write() and put every single piece of content in fixed position calculated against screen resolution. But life teaches that script-dependant pages intrinsically suck. Plus, browsers have a habit of hating each different parts of JavaScript standard.

Loading http://www.exit.szm.com in Opera made me re-think the idea of putting it in tables. Maximised is fine. Body background showing on margins? Can deal with that, would only have to edit the CSS file. But when you scroll it to some minuscule width or height, the looks of the page transcend the boundaries of the expression "to suck".

So much as I may hate Netscape and Opera, I have to make that site look well in all of them.

If I'm going to rewrite the code, I could as well make it already XHTML compliant instead of HTML 4 that I needed to be able to nest DIVs. After all, I don't have to nest the damned DIVs if I am to redesign the layout, do I?

I've spent over a week on compatibility issues, tampering with attributes and parameters... it all sucks. I'm fed up with it. I need a new layout.

The thing is, the visitors say they love the current layout. They would get over the change if the new layout were functional - and I can always feed them with standard compliance and compatibility excuses. But they wouldn't like it if I got rid of the graphics. They like it - it's smart, elegant and almost like in the game (I spent a whole evening pasting things from the Warcraft 2 map editor, rotating and cropping until I got what I needed for the eight border cells).

The options I have are:

1. To tell them all to use IE5+ or shut up. Note: some of them are doomed Netscape geeks. With IE5+ and HTML 4.0 Doctype, I can use CSS and still make it look like it looks with tables. I can even make a script blockade saying "come back with IE 5+". But it would be M$ Slavery (tm). This is not really an option.

2. I can get rid of the header and footer border pieces and leave the left and right be. The menu would be like it is now - word after word etc.

MenuItem1, MenuItem2, MenuItem3

With fixed position of left and right border without DIV nesting, I would get XHTML 1.0 compatibility (huzzah, my-site-is-the-newest-standard-compliant-and-I-own)

3. I can get rid of the left and right border and leave the header and the footer. The menu could be in the top section.

4. The header and the footer would remain and the menu would go to a box on the left. One link below the other etc.

MenuItem1
MenuItem2
MenuItem3

5. Width fixed at 800 (no resize option, nothing, just 800), with all pieces of the border working fine.

I definitely won't do a left-side menu together with always-on-top header or footer. That takes too much space and sucks.

I could do a totally different layout - on condition it doesn't look like the wretched PHP nuke template.

Now the question: Better go for left & right, or top & bottom? Or better design a new layout? Perhaps you've seen a layout I could ekhm... "take inspiration after"?