Design dynamic sites using Layers?

I want to learn how to design dynamic sites using layers and wondered if anyone knew of a guide (online or print).

One of the main problems is when all the styles are in .css but I need it to create new “boxes” dynamically or should I just insert a tables to do this?

What happened to internet explorer 4?

Well, you can do it mostly with classes and suchlike. For example, on the future movies site (front page), to take a relatively complicated example, you have:

title section - doesn't change (at least not much).
three columns - three divs
footer - single div, doesn't change much.

In the three columns, you need a header, then you need a block of code to represent each of the entries. For that you can use something like the following code:



And then style the header, link, image and paragraph all based upon the div class. Then you just loop through 6 (or however many) synopsises (??) outputting database values into them.

The divs will stack up inside their columns and all should work well.

I don't think there is a real issue with generating the content into the divs, any different than generating it into the tables. Once you have a template in place, it should all be pretty easy.

In other words, my answer is just too look at creating normal layouts with layers and then apply that to creating a template. For the futuremovies site, you would need to get as far as floating the columns to get the footer working properly with variable-sized dynamic content.

Its simple for me to detect browser types now and saving on bandwidth is great.

One problem I have is that Dreamweaver MX does not help me out as much as I would like. I like to visualize the layout and rather not hand code areas of it. I guess its something to do with templates.

I guess I have yet to master the basics of DIVs too.

I just use paper and pencil. Scribble down some boxes, what I want to achieve with those boxes, visually, and then the basics of how those goals can be met. That and a dual monitor display with code/browser makes it not so bad. I just hand code a few lines at a time then alt-tab f5. Once you get into the habit, you won't miss dreamweaver at all