Coming Soon: Navigator Layouts
What are Navigator Layouts?
Navigator Layouts are pre-coded page configurations created to help you save time. They're home pages created in several different designs as starting points for coding your design in Navigator.
Layouts are not templates! They are finished designs, but they're very basic. Everything is in grays and blues. The CSS has been tested in all major browsers on both Macintosh and Windows.
Start with CSS that's already tested
Take a layout that's similar to your design, and change the colors and background images for a quick road to your unique design. It's a lot easier to edit a little CSS than to write it all yourself!
You'll find the Navigator home page is written to be controlled almost completely with CSS. Everything is div elements with ids and classes, with extremely lean code. It's conceived to have generic page elements, so you can go to town on design with very few changes to the HTML.
Using the Navigator Layouts
Navigator layouts contain an index page layout, a page CSS file, dropdown menu CSS, and a set of images. To use the layout with your Navigator installation:
1. Make a backup copy of your Navigator files.
2. Replace the index.php, sn_styles.css and sn_dropdown-appearance.css with the files in the layout.
3. DO NOT replace the snp_images folder! Copy the images from the folder in the layout into snp_images in your original installation.
4. Begin editing files and images.
A note on fixed-width vs fluid-width designs
It used to be that fluid-width designs were considered superior, because the page layout adjusted itself no matter how wide the browser window was. These days, monitor resolution can be commonly found anywhere from 1024 pixels wide to 2400 pixels wide. A fluid-width design that looks beautiful at 1024 pixels wide will look strangely stretched at more than twice its width. For this reason, you will find many more instances of fixed-width design.
We provide a fixed-width centered layout pre-styled in the most important ways. A width of about 950px is a compromise that fills the screen pretty fully on lower resolution monitors and doesn’t look tiny on a higher-resolution screen. Even with cinema-style wide flat panel screens, most web visitors don’t expect to set their browser window to the full width.
When will Navigator Layouts be available?
Navigator is expected to be launched as a product in the first quarter of 2009. Since Layouts require a licensed Navigator installation to work (they're not standalone websites), the first Layouts will be rolled out soon after the product launch.
