Hi, I am building a new website for my book store and what i would like is for whenever a navigational link is clicked for the page to not change, but rather load the content within the primary content box.

 

I'm having a terrible time wording what i would like, but basically i want the page and background and menu bar to stay the same and just load the content within the main white box...instead of having to load all the images again whenever a link is clicked. does this make any sense to anyone?

 

here is the website: http://newsite.squarebooks.com

 

any help would be greatly appreciated!

You could do it with iFrames or CSS (CSS for preference, iFrames tend to screw with SEO). But then again, why not just have those elements on a new page? If the images don't change from page to page, then they'll be in the browser cache and won't have to be reloaded anyway. The rest of the header stuff (menu etc) are going to be v small too, it's not like they'll take ages to load..

Not "reloading" the page when people click on links will actually work against you, as some of your users won't realise the page has refreshed with new content.

 

I don't see why you can't just let the page reload, as the images will be in the browser cache anyway, so it will take a split second to load them again.

Rob is right - it's counter intuitive both from a design and user's point of view to not put new pages content into separate files. The load time will not be noticable enough to balance out the SEO and other problems this will create.

thanks guys, i will take all of that into consideration.

 

i really appreciate the responses.

If you want to stick into a single page, then Lightbox Effect would be a nice way I think so.