Template with CSS floating navigation menu?

  • Greetings!

    I’m looking at transitioning our church web site over to WordPress. It’s currently just a static site. I spent some time last fall eliminating the nasty table-based layout I inherited and transitioned it over to CSS.

    What I would like to do (and I haven’t seen any themes that do this yet or read any posts here that shed light on the issue) is to have a floating (dynamic) navigation menu on the left for page links and content on the right, like our current site:

    https://www.sthildastpatrick.org/index2.htm

    What I like about the menu is that if there is enough content on the page that you need to scroll, the menu stays with you, rather than disappearing off the top of the window, like pretty much any other site.

    The site currently consists of a CSS header, left navbar, footer (all the same for each page) and content. I’m hoping that this might not be too painless to implement in WordPress. I should note that I’m also a fan of clean design and would like to keep things simple.

    Any suggestions as to existing themes that might do what I want? Or speculation on how likely this is to work with WordPress?

    Many thanks!

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • If your site is coded in CSS already, you have most of the work done. Converting that to a WordPress theme won’t be too difficult at all.

    The only real trick is sometimes converting what’s done with static content into template tags to handle the content dynamically.
    You didn’t mention reading through the codex, so just in case, I’ll direct you to the Blog_Design_and_Layout section for some “casual” reading ??

    Thread Starter bgaspers

    (@bgaspers)

    Thanks for the insights. I’m just getting started digging through the Codex, but scanning the list of topics hadn’t turned up anything that looked like it was going to be spot on in terms of what I’m trying to do.

    Regarding static content, I was planning to use the pages feature to implement that.

    well, when I said “static content” I was refering to a static CSS XHTML site having blogrolls, posts, dates, etc hard coded. VS coding template tags for the dynamic creation of the content.

    Are you talking about something like I have on my site?

    Thread Starter bgaspers

    (@bgaspers)

    You mean the home/archives/about.. in the upper left? If so, yeah something like that.

    Except that navbar should dynamically scroll with the page so it stays in the upper left hand corner. Sorry I’m being so pedantic about that point, but I like that navbar design. Yes, I realize I’m “wasting” all that space in the left sidebar.

    The site currently consists of a CSS header, left navbar, footer (all the same for each page) and content. I’m hoping that this might not be too painless to implement in WordPress.

    It sounds like you want to create a new WP theme based on the earlier version of your website. If you do this, you could keep the stylesheets nearly the same as before, including the navbar styling (I think you’re describing #navbar{ position: fixed;}).

    So most of the work you’d be doing would be adapting the existing webpage structure into new WP templates — header.php, index.php, footer.php, sidebar.php –, adding the template tags you need.

    Thread Starter bgaspers

    (@bgaspers)

    Sam:

    Yeah, that sounds like what I need to do. I just need to dig into the Codex, and look through a few themes to see how the templates and tags work together with the stylesheets.

    Thanks!

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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