Pop boxes for content!

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VoloxitySF

Gawd
Joined
Apr 26, 2005
Messages
794
[H],

I'm in the midst of designing a site for myself. The current design is screaming for more content, I made all my links then I ran into a creative block. I really don't want to create more pages, I want everything to be based off of one homepage. For example, when I click on a link I want a 1000x280px box to pop up in a designated location with that the subject's information inside of it. To give you all a better idea, I want my content to pop up in boxes inside a specific DIV and look just like the facebook pop boxes do when you click on a picture.

Any ideas are greatly appreciated :)
 
You do realize that users hate that kind of shit, and it makes it hard for your page to be indexed, right?
 
Yeah I see what you're saying - a couple valid points. However, the way I design pages is far from typical and I just don't think making multiple pages fits my design's personality. I want to try my idea, and if it turns out horrible I'll approach with a different strategy.
 
You want Lightbox or one of its many derivatives. (There's jQuery plugins out the butt for this.) As Whatsisname said, you will use them sparingly if you care about your users or their ability to find your site through search engines. Search engine issues can be worked around if you keep your content inline and not pulled in through AJAX, but users will get fatigued if they encounter too many modal dialog boxes.
 
Lightbox looks like an awesome script, however I'm looking for something that can display large bodies of text and images. Other things as well, like paypal buttons
 
VoloxitySF said:
Lightbox looks like an awesome script, however I'm looking for something that can display large bodies of text and images. Other things as well, like paypal buttons
Click to expand...

Again, there's a million derivatives of Lightbox that can display any sort of media content you want. The decision depends mostly on what Javascript framework you are using. Are you looking for something that works with jQuery, YUI, ExJS or what?
 
I'm only familiar with jQuery - I'm relatively new to web development. I'm using Galleria on my page already and that uses jQ - so I'm assuming it would be best to stick with what I'm already utilizing?
 
You can use almost any variant of the Lightbox to display rich media or HTML. PrettyBox is a popular option these days.
 
Web 2.0 solution:

Keep creating pages. However, via Javascript, disable the default action of links (that is, going to another page), and load the content of another page via Ajax instead and populate the containers. As long as you maintain consistency between pages things should stay relatively simple.
 
don't break the back button if you do what krogen suggests
 
VoloxitySF said:
Yeah I see what you're saying - a couple valid points. However, the way I design pages is far from typical and I just don't think making multiple pages fits my design's personality.
Click to expand...
In that case I think that visitors won't fit your design's personality either.

People don't want pop-in boxes for content. From a usability perspective it is an extremely poor choice. Obviously it's your site and you can do whatever you like, but if your site requires return visitors as opposed to one-time visitors then you should seriously reconsider pop-in content.
 
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