css vs php page

[thosecars82]

Hello there

It turns out that I do not know very well when I should use css layers instead of php pages. I am going to put an example in order to make it clear:

Let’s say you have a typical site with a header, footer and a horizontal menu on the header. Then this horizontal menu has several buttons each of which take you to another php page with the same header and footer and the same horizontal menu.

Now, it just came to my mind this doubt:

I know that I could do this website with a different design from the explained above, that is to say, with just one html page and using different layers to show different content depending on the button which is pressed from the horizontal menu.

I would really like to know how to make this kind of decision of design:

1. When it is good to use just a page with several layers?
2. And when we should just use another php page

I think this questions are in the design field. Altough I know some css, some php and some dreamweaver, I am new at these things and above all at webdesign and therefore, I would really appreciate any suggestion, since I think you might have plenty of them.

I would like to learn proper uses of css layers to build websites. Otherwise I think I might be using layers for everything since it seems to me that you can do almost anything with just one simple php page and tons of layers. But I am sure I might be wrong, and there might be special circumstances in which layers are not recommended.

Thanks in advance

[Zyppora]

The beauty of webdesign is that there’s a ton of ways to do one thing. What you need to keep in mind is: do you know what you’re doing? I’ve seen sites with CSS that made my eyes bleed (go check out your average myspace page for example, or blog site, etc). The important thing is to do it neat and tidy, if you do that it won’t really matter which way you’re choosing to do things.

It depends on what you want I guess. If you’re running a website for the stockmarket, you’ll want to provide up-to-date information with each page refresh, and CSS layers won’t cut it (unless you use AJAX, which is a different story altogether). If you’re requesting a lot of (dynamically generated) information for each layer of content, you might want to use multiple pages to keep the strain off the PHP engine, allowing it to be more kind to your machine’s resources.