Jim Skamarakas

One of the problems with the current design, or lack thereof has been the main navigation look and feel - seperate from the look of things. Here we have played a few options and it has always come back to the same discussion point - design then technical implementations. Since Robble is an .asp developer, he is our guru on those moves.

Our current web page layout is based upon the following:

1. user requests www.upallnightgaming.com\default.asp
2. default.asp calles with an include contentop.inc
3. contenttop.in puts out the:
   1. head information
   2. then starts the page layout with the header table
      1. which includes the upallnightgaming.com logo
      2. a drop down main navigation menu by calling mainmenu.inc
      3. and then allows for a graphic banner across the rest of the header
   3. then creates the content table
      1. populates the left table with local navigation using an include for navmenu.inc
      2. starts the td element for the center content of the page
4. the control then returns to the calling page, in this case default.asp which does whatever is in the page
5. then calls with an include contentbot.inc
6. contentbot.inc handles
   1. closing the td element for the content pane
   2. handles the right pane for the banners and any right column ad elements
   3. closes the content table
   4. opens the footer table
   5. displays and logo’s, terms, notices or legal text for the community and the individual game

So this is done across all sites. Pugilist is a fan of a different design, which you can see at http://aa.upallnightgaming.com - his structure is set with a bascode, and seperate elements. In ech case, we are using .asp technology, includes and scripts. With the next version of .NET ASP.NET 2.0 and the upgrade to our forums software, we have the ability to go to all master pages and .aspx pages with a programatic approach to the page elements.

This is really going to depend on how much time Robble can help get this set up - if he converts one of the game sites to this approach, all of the others can be brough over with them. But that is to be determined. Last night I cleaned up the main menu’s by standardizing all of the non Pugilist sites to a single file mainmenu.inc. Now I need to find a way to have a single file on disk called mainmenu.inc and have it within all of the websites called virtually - a soft link or a pointer. something so I can make changes once and not have to replicate the file either manually or in a script - just post one .inc file and let all the sites point to it.

One of the problems is we treat ever game as a seperate site in IIS - this allows us to use the friendly url http://coh.upallnightgaming.com to get to pages for City of Heroes rather then http://www.upallnightgaming.com/coh or just extending the page numbers from the hundreds we have now and adding numbers as we go. The problem I see with this approach is how do we know a coh page from an eq2 or wow page to modify the local nav menu elements? include it on the page itself and not on the contenttop.inc or its’ .aspx equivilant? That is certaintly doable.

Any feedback or suggestions is certaintly apprecited and most welcome.

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