If you are a FrontPage user you can link your menu into a Shared Border so that you won't have to link it into each page separately.
Note: You should link the menu only to the Bottom Shared Border to make sure that you won't get into Netscape-trouble. The reason for this restriction is explained in the last section of this page.
How to use the Bottom Shared Border to display a menu in all pages:
1. Inside FrontPage, check the Bottom Shared Border box in all pages where you want the menu to appear.
(see notes below to understand why you should not choose the top, left or right shared border to insert the HTML menu-linking section)
2. Inside AllWebMenus, go to Tools-> Compile Properties-> FrontPage Support and check the "Support Shared Borders in FrontPage" box.
3. Close your Web in FrontPage so that all compile/link changes take effect.
4. Compile the menu at your WEB's root (not inside your _borders directory).
5. Use the "Link Compiled Menu to Web Page(s)" command to link the menu to your WEB's
_borders/bottom.htm file.
..and the menu should appear in all pages that use the Bottom shared border.
Why using the Bottom Shared Border does not affect the desired menu positioning on the page:
Since the menu floats on the page, its position is not determined by where you place the AllWebMenus linking code. Instead, its position is determined by the <Vertical Distance from Edge> and <Horizontal Distance from Edge> properties. So, position-wise it does not matter where you place the HTML menu-linking section. However, for Netscape-specific reasons it does matter that you not move this code from the end of the page! And the only way to achieve this with Shared Borders is to link the menu into the Bottom Shared Border and check the related box in Compile Properties.
For more info on how to achieve exact menu positioning you may read the "How Do I Position the menu relative to a page element" section.
Why choose the Bottom Shared Border only:
I.E. displays the menu perfectly regardless of which shared border is used.
However, Netscape will not do the same. This is why:
Netscape browsers do not function properly when NESTED tables are used because they will not render a table until they read the entire table (Netscape is not as flexible as IE on page redraws).
Therefore, it is not a good idea to nest tables like this:
<table>
<table>
blah, blah, code, code
</table>
</table
The reason has to do with Netscape taking forever to load the page and other problems. Rather, it is best to stack the tables like this:
<table>
blah, blah, code, code
</table>
<table>
blah, blah, code, code
</table>
When you use shared borders (let's say the TOP shared border), FrontPage converts your pages to table pages to separate the shared border content from your main pages. In FrontPage you will not see the "tables" - but only the content.
However, when you publish the page, FrontPage inserts the following code:
<!--msnavigation--><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"
width="100"><tr><td>
THIS IS WHERE YOUR TOP SHARED BORDER CONTENT GOES
SO, THIS IS WHERE THE AllWebMenus SECTION IS
</td></tr><!--msnavigation--></table>
<!--msnavigation--><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"
width="100"><tr>
<!--msnavigation--><td valign="top">
THIS IS YOUR MAIN PAGE CONTENT <p>This is really the body of my page. END
MAIN PAGE
<!--msnavigation--></td></tr><!--msnavigation--></table>
So, as you can see above, the final result is: AllWebMenus section is moved inside a <table> </table> structure and this is where the problem in Netscape begins... It seems that the problem is related to how Netscape interprets unclosed tags. The AllWebMenus script uses tables (<table>), rows and cells (<tr>, <td>) to implement the menu items. While everything is very well declared and very well formatted inside the AllWebMenus script, it seems that Netscape creates problems when there are UNCLOSED table tags prior to the menu call (this is the "nested tables" problem explained above).
Checking the "Support Shared Borders in FrontPage" box takes care of this Netscape inefficiency and allows your menus to display properly in Netscape too.