Internal Homepage

[jamesfed]

At the moment we have our own schools internal homepage setup (kinda like a landing page onto the most commonly used sites in the school + intranet) which is setup on a WordPress install.

 

The only issue is adding new links to the tables (yes they are tables) isn't always the easiest of things to do (well it can be done just with a load of faffing around). As such I was wondering if anyone knew of a better way to layout links in this form without using tables?

 

Idealy itd be something that allowed the homepage to grow easily (so adding extra rows/collums/links in) to.

[jsnetman]

Whats wrong with tables, most sites use them, tis the simplest way to get a uniform layout. Should it not be titled Intranet Homepage.

[jamesfed]

I just think its a bit of a faf trying to edit the tables (was thinking something like a XML file would be better but that’s outside of my knowledge).

 

Probably should be and no one would probably notice the difference but someone would and it'd take a very long time to explain them the difference between the two :D

[tmcd35]

Edit the page with a WYSIWY(almost)G editor like Frontpage or Dreamwaver or TintMCE, etc?

[AngryTechnician]

A quick fix that shouldn't involve a large amount of redesigning would be to make each link box a floating div instead of a table cell.

 

They would need to be all the same height for uniformity, but while you would need to define a fixed width for each one you could have different widths. They should then overflow onto a new line as needed, and you could insert a new one at any position without having to manually reorganise.

[powdarrmonkey]

A quick fix that shouldn't involve a large amount of redesigning would be to make each link box a floating div instead of a table cell.

 

A bunch of styled ul elements would let the browser determine flow more predictably. OP: one of these two approaches are the W3C's recommendation for getting rid of tables.

[p858snake]

What browser are your users using?

[dgsmith]

I grabbed a design from oswd.org and fiddled with it to get a really nice looking layout. It uses tables but with alot of CSS in there. I can't see how you can keep things looking uniform and consistent without some amount of tables. The approach I took was the minimum amount of picture-based links (school website, booking areas, common links etc). With the common links part, clicking it uses javascript to popup a context menu and all the sub-links are in there with a little icon next to it - really neat, tidy, compact and incredibly easy to add a new line to create a new link.

[Cue]

Stick a dynamic sidebar in the box, use a links widget in Wordpress to manage the links, simples.