Originally Posted by traveloid
I can help with the first question, but I do not know of template sites since we do all of the design here where I work.
If you are doing a larger site then the first thing I always like to know is how many pages there will be in the site and what the content on those pages is. This is not always easy to get out of the client, but if possible, I like to get as much as I can. By knowing what pages the client wants you can then determmine which pages are important enough to have on the main menu, the one that is vivible on all pages. Then you can decide if other pages fit as a subcategory of those main pages and hence make a submenu for each item in the main menu.
In this way you will not have a very large menu that is hard to find what people are looking for. For xample, for a hotel site you might have Accommodation as a main menu item, and then list each room tyupe as a separate submenu item.
As far as menu types go, the trend now is to havbe a DHTML menu, basically a "fly-out" menu where when you put your mouse over one of the main menu items, the submenu appears. There are programs out there that make these menus. Around here we use DHTML Menu Builder.
With the DHTML menu, you will usually have to make one change to the menu and then that change will affect all of the other pages that have that menu. However, if you change a filename in dreamweaver, you have to go back to your DHMTML menu software and make that change.
If you only want to use dreamweaver and have the submenus only appear on the pages that they pertain to, you will have to read up on how to use templates in dreamweaver. Once you create a template in Dreamweaver you can make changes to that template and those changes are propogated to the pages made from that template. So if you decide to chhange one of the submenu items, that change would end up on all pages that were made from that template. Another great feature of Dreamweaver that it inherently has is that anytime you change the name of a file it will automatically change the links to that file.
I hope this helps.
Viva Media: Edmonton Web Design