[cyberwood2004]

I'm something of a n00b, so please be gentle. I'm designing a site in Dreamweaver CS3 (free trial), under Win XP. I've made my basic template page on which all pages in the site will be based. The left column is a navigation bar with buttons to "About", "Articles", etc. pages. The links in the navbar are relative. My trouble: I've built a file hierarchy of product classes and products so that pages for Cleaners are in their own directory, pages for Groceries in another, etc. When I'm on a page that lives in /cleaners/handsoap/, clicking the Groceries button on the navbar doesn't go to the root folder for groceries.html, but to /cleaners/handsoap/groceries.html. The only alternative I see is to make the navbar links absolute, fully qualifying the URLs. I can't use /.../ because my directory structure varies. Any thoughts, anyone? Additional note: I'm resisting absolute addresses because I haven't loaded the site to my ISP yet, and I'm testing it on my laptop. So I see absolute addressing as, "I can't demonstrate the site from my PC yet." I guess my real question is, "Can I force a relative link to the root in some way similar to the way /.../.../ links work?"

Thanks, y'all

Edited for "clarity"

[tomdkat]

Maybe the base tag would be appropriate for you? You would set "base" in each page. I'm not sure if that would work without having a web server.

Alternatively, you could install a web server on your local computer for testing purposes. I run Apache at home for this purpose.

Here's another idea: have the navigation bar separate from content that will be displayed, like in an iframe or ilayer. The navigation menu would be in a DIV that would remain present and as people clicked the navigation links, the desired page would be loaded in an iframe or ilayer that would be in the body of the page. Understand?

Peace...

[Fyzbo]

You can reference the root of the website with a beginning /.

<a href="/groceries.html">Groceries</a>

[tomdkat]

He's saying that causes problems for him when testing on his local machine (not using a web server).

Peace...

[cyberwood2004]

Thanks, folks. Fyzbo, that sounds like what I want, and I'll try it first. Tomdkat, your suggestion is my plan b.

Thanks again.

[Fyzbo]

yea if you are just opening files in your web browser the / will reference the root of your drive, so tomdkat is right, none of the links will work.

I like tomdkat's suggestions of setting up a local server to test your website. Apache is free. Also some versions of windows come with a limited version of IIS built in.

[Sequal7]

Yes you can.

In your document root folder use any page with the nav bar on it as your template for the products.

Edit the page's content for the new page your creating (for example "irish spring" belonging in the cleaners/handsoap directory)
When your done editing the product's page, click file > save as > then choose the folder /cleaners/handsoap/ and type in the filename (example of irishspring.htm) and click save.
You will be prompted to "update links?", choose yes. Your page will now be in the cleaners/handsoap/ folder and the nav bar will have relative links back to the root folder.
Do this for each page you create and want the root files to link back. (if your product is supposed to link back to the fodler category in the dropdown nav bar, then you need to perform this first with the category file page, then create the product page off that one.)