Website Design

So I mentioned that I was redesigning my website, except that it's more like creating a new website. I have a particular style in mind, and I thought I knew how I was going to achieve that.

Basically, what I want is something like the Blogger admin pages, where you have a constant header, a page of tabs at the top, and the content changes according to which tab you've selected. Now I can simulate this pretty easily, but that means that I have to have lots of html pages with the same content - a pain, when you want to update it. So what I want to do is essentially have just one page which contains the header and the tabs, and then some way of dynamically loading content into the ... well... content part of the page. So I could put a mailto link in the header, and if my e-mail address changes, I only have to change it in one place. Or if I want to change the tab images or the number of tabs, again, only one page is affected.

I thought I found a good way to do that, using IFrames and this script from Dynamic Drive. It does exactly what I want, by allowing to me to load content into the IFrame based on which link is clicked. How to indicate which "tab" is currently active I hadn't quite figured out yet, but I thought I'd get to it later. Right now, it looks like it may be academic since the script seems to have a downside.

In IE, it gives me a security warning. Now this could just be because my security settings are relatively high, but I don't want people to have to disable their security to view my site, even if it is on a per-site basis. I just don't think it's a good idea, and I don't think people will want to do it.

In Firefox, it doesn't even work. The link just doesn't load the content into the IFrame. Whether this is a security issue, or whether the script just doesn't work with the latest version of Firefox, I don't know. But I use Firefox pretty much exclusively, and I hate - no, abhor - sites that only work in IE. So if I can't get it to work in Firefox, with relatively high security settings, it's not going to happen. Ah ha! Just found the problem - the name of the frame is context sensitive in Firefox, but case-insensitive in IE!

I'm not very up to date on website design and implementation; the last time I created/updated my site I did it by hand, editing the html in notepad. Okay, I exaggerate - I used Netscape Navigator's editor, but that's almost as bad. Image maps are about as sophisticated as I got. So there may be a much better way to accomplish what I'm trying to do, except that I don't know about it. I'm sure it must be a pretty common problem, and I'd guess that people out there must have solved it; short of randomly browsing until I see sites that look the way I want mine to look, and then trying to figure out how they did it, I'm in the dark. Any ideas?