The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #14583   Message #126078
Posted By: unclenort
20-Oct-99 - 05:59 PM
Thread Name: Web Page design for lyric sites
Subject: RE: Web Page design for lyric sites
for my first attempt at a similar project i used the old A-Z format using bookmarks to navagate through a single HTML document with the songs arranged in alphabetical order. here's the results click here
. effective, but it has some serious drawbacks. with 240 songs download time is a killer and IMHO its sloppy.

right now i'm reorganizing all this and more using a java tree menu applet. it looks like the folders inside of windows device manager. you Know you click the +sign next to the folder and three(or how many you want) drop down under it. in my example the first folder is songbook click on that and 4 more folders drop down;lyrics,lyrics and chords,guitar tab,and banjo tab. click on one of those and you get 26 folders labled A-z. click on the letter that the song your looking for starts with and all the songs that begin with that letter are listed. click on the song your looking for and presto it loads the HTML page with what you are looking for.

some of the advantages of useing the tree menu are its very easy to navagate, it holds an infinite amount of data(in this case songs) on a single page, and its very neat and proffesional looking. on the down side, its a little extra work for the webmaster. but all things considered i think the results are worth it.
i hope that this is understandable, sometimes i'm not very clear.
unclenort