My colleague is complaining that the navigation bar on her site comes and goes. It's a pretty straight forward page, the nav is plain text links, so this is puzzling. The site was written in Dreamweaver CS3, she is using IE7, does this maybe have something to do with the browser cache?

This is the link: http://diabetespsychologist.com/

Thanks for any insight.

Dani AI

Generated

Short answer: the nav "flashing" almost always comes from full-page reloads and asset loading, not a mysterious IE bug. was right that each click loads a fresh document, and that creates the pause you see. ’s Flash buttons make the effect worse because plugin-managed content often repaints differently across browsers.

Quick troubleshooting (do this first)

  1. Reproduce the problem while watching the browser DevTools → Network. See which files are re-requested and their sizes.
  2. Check response headers for Cache-Control/Expires so images/JS can be cached between pages. See MDN on HTTP caching: HTTP Caching.
  3. If Flash assets flicker, try temporarily removing them to confirm they’re the culprit.

Practical fixes you can apply now

  • Make the nav text/CSS-based instead of image/Flash buttons. That removes plugin repaint issues.
  • Reduce file weight and requests: compress images, combine small images into sprites, and minify CSS/JS. Preload key assets to improve perceived performance: Preload critical assets.
  • Use a server-side include or template include for easier maintenance (authoring convenience), e.g. with PHP:
    <?php include 'nav.html'; ?>

    Note: Dreamweaver templates help editing but still emit separate pages; they don’t stop the browser from reloading the nav on each navigation.

If you want the nav never to be torn down, you must move to a persistent container (frames/iframes — not recommended) or to partial page loads (AJAX/SPA) so only the main content is swapped. For simple caching and server-side includes see the Apache SSI docs: Server Side Includes.

A small server tweak often fixes the perceived flicker: set long cache lifetimes for static assets (images, CSS, JS) so the browser renders the nav instantly from cache. An Expires/Cache-Control policy is usually enough.

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My colleague is complaining that the navigation bar on her site comes and goes.

by this do you mean the flickering at the top as you click each link?

It looks like each page is an individual document, so when you click the links, the browser has to send a request to the server and the server has to respond back. Then, the browser has to read the response and render the page. Each time the browser loads a new page, you get that little pause, which is why you see the flicker. A lot of variables (including browser cache) can affect how this page may render for individual users...

Yes, please explain more on how it just comes and goes. That is too vague. It's like saying, "She gave me a look and turned away, what does this mean?"

I was unable to duplicate the error using IE7. Have you experienced this problem yourself?

I think I may be having a similar issue. I designed a website in Dreamweaver CS3 that also has a nav bar that disappears and reappears. It's very quick sometimes, like a flash and sometimes it is slower and seems to disappear for a moment. This happens in Firefox and Safari on the Mac and sometimes IE (all the most recent versions) on the PC. The degree of severity of the flashes varies. I wasn't sure what caused it and am now working on another site and running into the same issue again. This time it's more than just the nav bar - it's also 3 independent Flash created buttons that are flickering BADLY from page to page. I understand what "johnsquibb" said about each page being set up as a completely new page, so the nav bar has to reload every time. That is how my pages are set up currently. Is there a simple solution to avoid having to create a whole new page every time? I am pretty new to this, don't know CSS yet. Would putting the nav bar in a template work at resolving the flickering issue from page to page? If not does someone have another suggestion?

The live website I have up right now that has the flickering issue is http://www.raysrestaurants.com Thank you to whomever can answer this.

befuddled--

you may consider optimizing some of your images to reduce the load strain on your website. Your header bar weighs in at about 110Kb, which will take a few seconds to load on even the fastest connections. I always recommend this site as a useful free tool for analyzing a webpage: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/. By reducing the size of your images, you can shave off seconds on load time, which will certainly help with any 'flickering' problems.

As for alternative methods, you can eliminate the need to load the image everytime the user clicks to another page by using the old-school method of employing frames. By putting the header or menu that would appear on every page inside of its own frame, you can load new content inside other frames. This keeps the images from having to load everytime. If you aren't too familiar with frames (Dreamweaver has some frame templates you can choose from), check out the w3c website: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/present/frames.html.

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