How To Change All Navigation Links At Once
March 18, 2008 | Design, Tips and Tricks
One of the biggest problems that you can encounter when expanding your website is changing the navigation on each of your pages when you wish to add a new link. This may not prove to be a big problem at the start when you only have a few pages, but what happens when you decide to change the navigation links on your site when you have 100s of pages? This is where you can use the following simple solution in your webpage editor to help you out.
The Dreamweaver templates feature
Dreamweaver has an incredibly handy feature that allows you to create one template page that will have control over the rest of the pages on your site when you change it. So if you create a new page from this template, every time you decide to alter the main template, the rest of the pages will change with it.
I’m not great at explaining things, so hopefully that was clear enough. Nonetheless, if you give it a try you will realise how simple it is, and you will wonder why you didn’t try it out sooner.
The only problem with this method is that any pages that you currently have will need to be made again from this main controlling template. But it is well worth taking the time to replace these pages and create them from the template, as it will save you a hell of a lot of hassle in the future. So here we go…
How to do it
1) Open up Dreamweaver, and open up the main page that has the design that you want the rest of your pages to look like, with all the navigation you want included on future pages. This will normally be your home page.
2) Highlight the text or boxed area that you will add content to on future pages. For example, if you put articles and content in the centre are of your page, highlight the text in this area or the table surrounding it. This will become the part that looks different on each page; the rest will stay the same.
3) Click on insert > template object > editable region. Click OK when it tells you that the file will be converted into a template. You will then be asked to give it a name, so give it whatever you like, it doesn’t really matter. I normally call it something like ‘content’.
4) You can add a few more editable regions if you like, it all depends on how much of the page you intend you change on future pages. It’s a good idea to think about how you intend on expanding your site and how the navigation will turn out when adding your editable regions.
5) Save the page, it will be saved as a template.
6) Now the next time you decide to make a new page for your site, click on: file > new, and then choose the ‘template’ tab, which will show you a list of templates that you have made. There will probably only be the one, so click on the one you just made and open it up. Now add content as you wish to your editable regions, and save the page as you would with any other normal page.
Done!
The next time you decide to change your navigation across all of your pages, all you will have to do is open up the main template from your files and edit away. When you decide to save, it will ask if you would like to update the rest of the pages that have been created from this template. Click OK and the rest of your sites navigation will change. Pretty simple.
It will probably be a good idea to give this a test first, just to see how it works. It’s not too difficult, but it’s always a good idea to know exactly how everything works before creating all of your pages from one template.
Also, be sure to add enough editable regions, so that you won’t want to add content to one place but be unable to because you forgot to make it editable.
Have fun!
No comments yet.