Best way to build a navigation bar with Radiant CMS?

Hello Radiants (is that the correct title?),

i want to build a website for a client with Radiant. I started with the
third install option of Radiant - the full featured blog layout of
Radiant. However this site should be a ‘classic’ website, not a blog, so
i want to include a navigation bar on the left side. My - annoying (?)
newbie questions - are:
1.) Is it possible with Radiant to have a left side bar, too (together
with the existing right side bar of the blog layout)?
2.) Can i use this new sidebar as a navigation bar or exists other
Radiant specific constructs for this purpose?
3.) Are there other ‘best practice’ to follow or has anybody hints to
consider for this task (building a simple navigation bar in Radiant)?

Thanks in advance for some help!

Greetings,
Andreas S.

Andreas,

  1. The short answer is that Radiant can do whatever you like visually;
    it
    doesn’t restrict you! So feel free to design your pages in whatever
    tool
    you want, then break them into logical parts (focusing on structure and
    reuse), then import them into Radiant. There are a lot of different
    strategies to implementing your pages in Radiant, but that would be a
    book-length topic! The typical practice is to have layouts that
    describe
    the overall structure of pages, with various Radius tags to include
    pieces
    of the rendered page; pages that have the actual content in multiple
    parts;
    and snippets that are frequently reused pieces of HTML or Radius tags.

  2. Look for information on the <r:navigation> tag on the wiki, weblog,
    and
    in the source code. While it’s kind of inflexible (I’m working on a
    patch
    for that issue), it does the job well enough in most cases.

  3. The only “best practice” I can cite is to use standards-based
    HTML/CSS
    (which nowadays means using lists for navigation menus), but that goes
    for
    any website.

Hope this helps,

Sean C.
seancribbs.com

Andreas,

Atop what Sean said, or rather, to reiterate: Radiant is no different
than any other CMS/Blog tool insofar as presentation layer is
concerned, perhaps a bit more flexible, if anything.

I personally base my “designs” (I admit it, I’m not a web designer) on
XHTML strict and CSS 2, after that I look at the current root-level
page that comes with Radiant. And then substitute with radius tags any
page parts that require iterating over a list (possibly in the DB). In
a way it is not that different than writing an XSLT/XPath template.