Hi Rich,
>> Are there examples of "more than basic" NetTalk driven websites I can look at to see what's possible?
here are some of ours that you can at least see. (most start with a login so are not terribly useful to you).
a)
www.capesoft.com - this is a mix of static and dynamic content. A lot of it was our original site, but we've used a consistent CSS file between the static parts and the dynamic parts so it's hard to tell the difference. this approach works best when really the site is being presented as a "static" site - there very little, if any, input for the average user. (There are some management forms etc but you have to login to see those.)
b)
www.clarionshop.com - this is all dynamic, with a custom CSS theme. It's quite old now (still in NetTalk 5) but keeps trucking along. I want to update it, but haven't had the time.
c)
www.biodiversity.co.za - this is hosted here in SA, so probably quite slow for you - but is also a dynamic site. There's a guest login so you can browse around etc. (update -- the guest login facility is disabled at the moment, but should be back in the next few days.)
d) clarion.capesoft.com - this is forum software. If you register you'll be able to see and do more. Along the lines of our main site, but with a slightly different theme.
>> What if I decide to use a web design company to design the UI, complete with menus, drop downs, etc. Can their work (in theory) be integrated into a NetTalk app.
There are good and bad design companies - but ideally you'd work with a designer who understands the framework you're working in. While you can almost literally do anything, some things will be a _lot_ easier than other things.
What I would do is create the basic site - ie it has a header, it has a menu, it has a footer, it has some static pages, it has some browses, and so on. Don't worry too much about what it looks like, just think about flow, content and functionality.
Then you can literally hand the whole site off to a designer, and they can do amazing things just with CSS. They would have access to the static stuff (like the header and footer) and the static pages. They could make the menu on top, or on the left (at runtime, using the _menutype_ switch) and they can tweak the css to make it look like anything. There will likely be some interaction with you (they prefer this menu over that menu, please add a "hook" in here and so on) but they're really working independently of you.
And that's how it should be. this really is different to the programming you're used to where "you" have to design the whole programming - including the interface etc. On the web content and presentation are very different _if_ the site is developed with CSS in mind. Static web design programs do not typically make use of CSS the way they should, and so it becomes very difficult to "change" the look of a whole web site.
NetTalk apps by contrast heavily promote the use of CSS (because you can easily embed hard-coded visuals into the exe). This use of CSS pays off in the long run.
Personal anecdote : The CapeSoft site has been around for 20 years, and like most "static" sites got added to over the years using various WYSIWYG designers. the result is a site that is surprisingly large, with no consistent styling. When we wanted to tweak some things it meant making changes of something like 500 pages - and some of those pages (like our docs) were enormous. To remedy this Susanne (our Office Manager) has spend around 18 months of her "not busy" time reformatting each page to use a single, standard CSS file. by changing this one file (well, ok, there are 2 for production reasons) we can now change the look of the site _completely_. Including (almost) all our docs. The task is not yet 100% complete, but the freedom it gives us over the look of the site is staggering.
The site you mentioned has a really simple style - it would be easy to do something very similar in NetTalk.
cheers
Bruce
Topic: Website UI (Read 3571 times)