HELP! It's all messed up!

[Erika]

I made the drop-down menus for all of my pages, or rather they were included content and then I put the needed code in the head. In the preview screen everything was fine. Now i've uploaded the pages, every single one of them, and it doesn't look right at all. Not at all what the preview screen showed, or even when I previewed on the internet! I need to get this figured out before people see my site like this. HELP!!!!!!!!!!! What happened.

You can see what I mean at ILTenants.com for the horizontal menu and what I mean also for the verticle menu at See In Blue on Left of page

[Twey]

It looks like you've used some form of WYSIWYG editor. I suggest you write your pages yourself. WYSIWYG editors are poorly named -- what you see is rarely what you get (or even what other people see, for that matter).

[Erika]

Can you be more specific? I don't know what a wysiwyg editor is. I used Frontpage and this is the first time i've ever had something not give me what i saw. Like I said, everything looked fine in preview mode and even the online preview mode. Why did everything change once I uploaded the pages?

PLEASE HELP!!!!!!!!!!!! I need to get this fixed ASAP.

Thank you.

[BLiZZaRD]

I used Frontpage

And there in lies the problem. FP is really a horrible web standard page making tool. Check out the Tips and Tutorials board for a thread about FrontPage.

Can you be more specific? I don't know what a wysiwyg editor is.

WYSIWYG = What You See Is What You Get. Basically it means that the application (in this reference a text editor) is only able to do what comes with it. There will be no add ons, there are no sub menus for functionality, etc etc.

Twey was making a slight retort about the name What You See Is What You Get, as if taking it to mean what YOU see as out put, but in reality it is what application menus, file, save, etc. that you get with the program, not the output itself. Although often times it can/does mean both.

If you can see and learn what FP is supposed to do with the code and rewrite it by hand in something like notepad, then the output will be what you want. Front Page is known to add extra crap at publish time (would explain your conundrum here) that isn't there while editing.

Write the page in notepad and upload that, instead of the FP version and see if there is a difference.

[Erika]

So, are you saying I can not use drop down menus with Frontpage? I really am not understanding what went wrong and where.

[boxxertrumps]

Proposed new rule of DD:
Members of this forum may not use Frontpage.

Refer to this thread...
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/forums/s...ad.php?t=16592

[BLiZZaRD]

So, are you saying I can not use drop down menus with Frontpage? I really am not understanding what went wrong and where.

No, not saying you can't, saying you shouldn't.

Front Page places it's own "parsing" codes and other et cetera in the script/page during publishing (meaning when you take it out of front page program and make it an HTML page or whathaveyou)

The only way to avoid this is to either 1) know what you are doing coding wise and can spot the extraneous code and remove it, or b) not use Front Page.

Of course if you can do 1) then you will be doing 2) as well

[djr33]

Frontpage isn't special. It just does things wrong... a lot. It 'can' make the same html as anything else. It just has a habit of not doing so.
You could certainly do this in it if you just used the code view and stuck with that.
Many WYSIWYG editors like to change things around with javascript and such, so that's likely why it won't work. Also, FP is annoying and tries to make things more like what microsoft seems to believe makes sense... just like internet explorer. In general, FP generates a lot of IE only style code in addition to doing strange things to the code in general.

The *ONLY* effective way to use a WYSIWYG editor is to keep an eye on the code it generates and be able to fix it. If you can't fix it, then you're stuck with the error-filled code it generates. If you can fix it, then using WYSIWYG may save you time, as long as you don't need to worry about the fact that it may not work right away

[Erika]

djr33, Thank you for your comments.

I've changed my site to being at least viewable for now. But, in the meantime I need to figure out how to get it right, so I created a test page. Can you help me figure out where the coding is incorrect? You can see the test page at http://www.iltenants.com/testtenantscreening.htm

Thank you,
Erika

[djr33]

Hmm.... javascript isn't really my thing. Not sure what's wrong. It appears that the mouseover area for the second item on the menu is just off, and everything else *should* work. However, I can't really tell why this is, just glancing at it. I'll let someone else take a look who has a more clear idea of what's going on.

Note: The title is quite funny. Frontpage generates the comment "HELP!!!!!! It's all messed up!" frequently