AllWebMenus has a very simple and intuitive way of linking your menus to your web pages, regardless of the html authoring tool you use. However there are different ways to insert the menu to your website pages and this depends on the way your authoring tool is handling the pages:
Integration
Method 1: Linking to Dynamic Web Templates (DWT)
Microsoft Expression Web is similar to MS Frontpage in several aspects and when you create a new website the files are stored in the folder C:\Documents and Settings\UserAccountName\My Documents\My Web Sites\mysite (unless you change the folder during the website creation). This means that the HTML files that you wish
to contain your menu are located inside that folder.
In Expression Web your web site structure
will appear as shown in the image at the left:
As you can see one of the files has the extension *.dwt and that means that this file is a Dynamic Web Template.
In Expression Web there are no shared borders used (unless you use third party tools to restore this kind of functionality). Instead of this "old approach" the template system has been adopted which is a more flexible way to create and maintain a website.
A Dynamic Web Template is an HTML-based master copy of a web page that you can create to contain settings, formatting, and page elements such as text, graphics, page layout, styles, and regions of a web page that can be modified.
You attach a Dynamic Web Template to the pages in a website, and that template defines the layout for those pages. You can use any number of Dynamic Web Templates in a website, and you can attach a Dynamic Web Template to as many pages as you like.
Since there are no shared borders, all you have to do is to link the menu in the dwt files of your website.
1. Specify your Site Root folder in AllWebMenus
AllWebMenus needs to know where your web site is locally stored.
As shown below, click on "Tools -> Project Properties", select the "Folders" option
and enter the "Site_Root folder":
2. Compile your menu
Click on "Tools -> Compile Menu" to start compiling your menu and linking it to your HTML pages:
Once you do this step, all the necessary AllWebMenus files will be automatically created inside the C:\Documents and Settings\UserAccountName\My Documents\My Web Sites\mysite folder:
3. Link the menu to your Dynamic Web Template(s)
After you complete the compile process, in the form that appears, select the button that allows you to link the menu to your web pages.
This opens the Link Compiled Menu to Web Page(s) form in order to select the web pages that you wish to contain your menu. You can select many pages at once and link to as many pages as you wish:
Make sure that you have selected the "Templates (*.dwt)" file type in the combo box below the file list for the master.dwt file to be visible.
Select the master.dwt and/or any other dwt file of your website and press the button shown in the bright green circle to add the file(s) in the list of files where the menu code will be inserted.
This will enable the "Link" button which you will have to click on for the menu linking to be completed:
4. Check the Dynamic Web Template updated code
After you complete the linking process, in Expression Web open the master.dwt file and select the "Code" view to see the template code. You will notice that the page is now updated and the AllWebMenus code is inserted just below the <BODY> tag:
That's all! The menu is linked in the template and each time you need to change the menu you have to repeat the 2nd step just for the menu files to be updated. The menu will appear in all html pages attached to the dwt template files where the menu is linked.
Integration
Method 2: The AllWebMenus linking to html pages
It is highly recommended to use Dynamic Web Templates to handle a multi-paged website in order to keep your files updated in the most easy way. If you don't want to use dwt files or the pages of your website are not so many, you can always link the menu in your html files just like in any other web authoring tool. This case is covered in the generic AllWebMenus linking process.
