We have been working on our homepage parse file recently and coming up with a great design. Like most sites the header and footer will remain the same for almost every page on our site. If I have created those two parts in my parse file for my "home" design, is it possible to link these to my "sub" designs? Or should I just be adding the same code into each parse file?
Also, I want to have my .css files under my home design, but use them under all other designs, would I just create a link to those .css files under my other designs?
You could use the nested content design area to achieve this, although it has the potential to get messy.
I don't see many other ways around this other than perhaps using the design for header and footer, and a paint layout for each individual section.
Well I am confused then what people usually do about this. Squiz.net uses a consistent header and footer, and the content areas seem to use different designs. How do they manage this? Is the same info in each parse file? Or are you not using multiple site designs?
It's much easier to manage a website using one design, but many customisations.
Typically, as per your example, things like the header and footer would go in your parse file, as well as a Body Design Area.
If you wanted a section of your site to have a right-hand-side related links box for example, you could create a Nested Content Design Area, then create a customisation based on this design area for that section of the site. You would then apply this Design Customisation to this section of the site, instead of the base Design.
If you do have more than one parse file that is essentially the same design, then as you've suggested, any changes to the HTML of one parse file, need to be made to the other parse files (with the same design).
This is covered in the MAT330 Design course if you would like to learn about this in a formal environment.
[quote]Also, I want to have my .css files under my home design, but use them under all other designs, would I just create a link to those .css files under my other designs?
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Just to answer this one – yes, you can link the CSS file across multiple designs. 
You can do the same with images and any other associated file.
[quote]Well I am confused then what people usually do about this. Squiz.net uses a consistent header and footer, and the content areas seem to use different designs. How do they manage this? Is the same info in each parse file? Or are you not using multiple site designs?
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We use a few designs on Squiz.net – most with the same header/footer HTML in each and then different HTML below. Its sometimes easier to manage if you have completely seperate designs and parsefiles.
Are there speed issues that I need to think about when using multiple designs? Would it be faster, in terms of load speed, to go the route that Daniel is speaking of?
Also, if I did use custom design areas, how do I deal with showing and hiding items that I only want on my "home" page? Such as a nested news listing that I only want on the homepage? It just seems like it would be much easier to use multiple designs, I just don't want it to greatly slow down my site. With the planning and design of our site, it seems pretty impossible to build our site with just one design. there are so many different sections that I don't know if we can do it without more than on design...
I would love to take a training course on this, and my company would pay for it too! But we are in the US, so unless there is online training I would be out of luck.
[quote]Are there speed issues that I need to think about when using multiple designs? Would it be faster, in terms of load speed, to go the route that Daniel is speaking of?
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Its actually faster to do it with multiple designs, which is why we do it that way. We have three major designs: Home Page, Section Home Page, Inside Page. We apply the “Inside Page” to the Site asset and let it cascade, and then apply either Home Page or Section Home to specific pages as “Override Designs”
[quote]I would love to take a training course on this, and my company would pay for it too! But we are in the US, so unless there is online training I would be out of luck.
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I think you guys should look into flying a trainer to your campus for a week or two and training as many people as you can in that time. To do the entire course series takes 8 days. It would be much cheaper overall for you to bring a single trainer from Australia.
[quote]Also, if I did use custom design areas, how do I deal with showing and hiding items that I only want on my “home” page? Such as a nested news listing that I only want on the homepage? It just seems like it would be much easier to use multiple designs, I just don’t want it to greatly slow down my site. With the planning and design of our site, it seems pretty impossible to build our site with just one design. there are so many different sections that I don’t know if we can do it without more than on design…
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We use one design for our whole site. The home pages of each section is just a standard page with the different stuff we want for each nested. All the other pages are just asset lists or plain standard page content.
In order to have different designs we use CSS to change the width and placement of elements depending on the context. This means that we can show or hide certain things as required. On the site home page for example the secondary content div which is on the right hand side of pages everywhere else is hidden with CSS and the feature section which only shows on wide screens is moved in.
I have found that using a cleaner single design with a standard page structure that can used used for any part of the site, and styling this differently with CSS is a lot simpler and manageable, than a complex design with many customisations, or multiple designs. (I have used all three).
You’ll see that the class on the body is changed to alter the design layout and brand colours.
Happy to supply more info if you are interested!
cheers,
Richard
I would be very interested in understanding more how you did this. Any chance of seeing some examples of your parse file? I am still new to this…
[quote]I would be very interested in understanding more how you did this. Any chance of seeing some examples of your parse file? I am still new to this…
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Sure.
send me your email via the list software and I’ll send it to you, and we can take it from there.
R