Hoping someone can help me here. I am creating a website for a small group of people, so it doesn't need to be fancy and I'm not planning on putting it in a lot of search engines. the site is being used to store some writing/stories by several different people. Each person gets their own "startpage" with the list of stories/works they have written on the left side. Each story page will also have the list of works on the left side. I have given an example startpage url so you can see how its set up now. I don't want to do a dhtml menu because some stories will be broken up into chapters and others wont so it will be confusing, and i don't really understand javascript. What I want to do is make the left side navigation division similar to an i-frame, without the i-frame tag. I want one "navigation file" for the list of stories that i can edit, and "embed/link" it on each story page, so that any changes i make to the nav file will be updated on each page. Is this possible? I guess I'm trying to combine the Dhtml menu with iframes lol.

I think you don't want to do that either on a Bravehost free site. Advertising appears in each frame. Is this intended to be a Wizard site like the page you gave us? If so, the answer is likely to be a lot more complicated.

well i don't want to actually have frames, as i have read that they are basically not used anymore. i just want to "mimic" the frames action. like how the dhtml menu has the JS file that you edit, and then the whole menu is updated? (from what i understand anyway) and i used the Wizard to build the first page, but then took the template css style and use a text editor to do the other pages. so the design is a Wizard design, but i'm not using the actual wizard anymore. just copy and paste and change it as i need to. i don't understand how to do the dhtml script as i'm not familiar with javascript. so is there a way to have a frames-like navigation bar, without using frames? thanks for your response.

I agree with you and Corwings, that frames are not the best choice. While they do work, free sites users have a big problem with them. Some web hosts allow you to suppress the ad banners, when your using frames based sites, but Bravenet is not one of them. There is also an overhead problem. When you start getting a lot of pages and need to share data between frames, it becomes very tedious to keep you site working properly. My site was originally frames based, but I re-wrote it using tables and a Javascript based menu system. It's far easier to manage now.

You don't need frames to do what you want, but not having a good understanding of DHTML and Javascript is a big handicap. Javascript is object oriented and the code looks very much like C++, but is a little simpler to use. If you understand a little bit about object oriented programming, you can use Javascript to talk to any HTML structure. Do you have any programming experience? If not, I recommend that you get some good books on the subject. I personally prefer books to on-line tutorials, but they are useful too.

Here is an example of a site that I re-wrote for someone who was having problems using frames on a free web host, Fear Not. It's not big, but illustrates several different concepts. The original was 11 HTML pages, and couple of images. The rewritten version is only one HTML page, a Javascript file, and a couple of images. If you are interested in looking at the code, here is a link to a Fear Not Zip File.

As I said, the site was originally written in frames. The problem the user was having was not the ad banners, but the popups. The site was on a web host where the banners could be disabled, but you couldn't disable the popups. The popups were very often bigger than the frame window, and the window had scrolling restricted. So with some popups, you could not see a way to close it out. This obscured the whole frame. The user tried to switch to iframes, but that just gave the same problem.

The solution was to re-write the page using a table for basic structure. The roll-overs on the menu were handled by the link style definitions. The window on the right is simply a