Menubar Configuration Help

Overview

Use the Easy Style Selection page (follow the link from your Admin page) to simply select a whole new style for your website.

Or you may use some or all of the many other options on the Admin pages to fine tune the style of your site.

Edit Display of Doctor and Nurse Names

Before making any changes here you should first ensure that your staff details are up to date on the Staff Maintenance Screen. Changes on the Menu Bar editing page are only for cosmetic effects on the display on the menubar. To update staff details properly, and to control the display on the appointments, repeats and registration pages you should use the Staff Screen.

Quite possibly the display of names needs no adjustment, but you may find it useful to fine tune the description of registrars, assistants etc.

Names, including any description such as (nurse) will all display on one line if there is room. To force a line break so as to place descriptions under the names use a #.

e.g.

• Dr K Jones#(assistant)
  
  will display as
  
  
• Dr K Jones
  (assistant)

You can also force lines not to break so that all of a name appears on one line, by putting $ between the names e.g. Dr$Katherine$Johnson.

Select Items to Display

If you have not yet activated the appointments/repeat scripts/registration sections then they will be displaying messages that they are in demo mode. Therefore it doesn't matter if they are linked from your menubar since patients will be warned off trying to use them by the demo message. But if you want to hide the links to them until your are ready to use them then you can use this section to remove all mention of them. Select which features you want to show or hide on the menubar and when you rebuild the page by pressing the button at the foot of the page then these changes will be made.

Add Links to the Menu Panel

Please refer to the help file for the improved menu editing feature.

Set the Colour for the Background of the Menubar

You can alter the appearance of your pages by setting the colour of the background of the menubar. Just choose a colour and try it out, but ensure that you choose a stylesheet that has a constrasting colour for the menubar text, or else you won't be able to see it!

The stylesheets named "colour-font" e.g. blue-arial are designed to suit the menu background of the colour mentioned.

If you want more colours added to this selection then email support and say what colour you'd like.

Select Menubar Logo

Your menubar has alogo at top left. If you have your own practice logo, or perhaps a picture or drawing that you want to use, then you can upload it into your logos directory (Use the uploads link on the Customised Website link on the Admin page) and then it will become available for you to select here to make it your menubar logo. Logos must be uploaded in gif format, if your logo is in another format you can use graphics software to convert it to gif format.

Please note the guidelines on the use of the NHS logo. We provide a version of the logo with the specified size of border for use when you are placing a logo against a background that is other than white.

Select a Stylesheet

The Stylesheet sets the style for your pages - font face, size, colour. We have prepared a few alternative stylesheets that you can select from the Admin screen. You can click next to the one that you want to try. If you don't like the effect you can try another one. If you get in a mess then you could simply use the Home Pages - Easy Style Selection screen and select a new style, since this will automatically update your stylesheet to one that matches the colour scheme selected.

If you are feeling more adventurous you can write your own style sheet, or download and edit the ones that we provide. You can upload the finished result using the file upload utilities on the admin page for the users of customised websites. You should upload to the root directory, which is the first one that you are offered when you use the upload utility. Your file must have the extension .css but should not be called "default.css" unless you want it to overwrite your current stylesheet.

Rebuild the Automated Pages

When you have made your selections in the areas above, if you want to rebuild your pages to incorporate these changes then enter your Admin Code Name and Password.

You also must select the radio button "Yes, go ahead and make the changes" before pressing "Update". This may seem superfluous but it is an extra safeguard before you commit your changes.

If you have uploaded a custom built homepage index.html or a links page then activating the update will have no effect on these. If you wish to revert to the automated pages then you should delete your index.html and /links/index.html files since these take precedence over the automated pages.

In any sections where you make no selection then no changes will be made.

View the Result

Sometimes when you go to have a look at your newly changed pages it seems that there is no change. Most likely this is because you are looking at an old version of the page in a cache, either on your computer or from your ISP.

1. Try closing down your browser and restarting it, most often this will cause you to fetch the latest version of the page.
   
   
2. Set your browser to load a page every time you visit it, e.g.
   
   
   • In Internet Explorer go to Tools|Internet Options|General|Settings|"Every Visit to the Page".
     
     
   • In Netscape go to Edit|Preferences|Advanced|Cache and set "Document in Cache is compared to document on network" to "Every Time".
     
     
3. Sometimes, particularly with Freeserve, your ISP is caching the page and may give you an old copy. There's not much you can do about this except try again later. Sometimes disconnecting and redialling will connect you to a different cache machine which may work better.