In order to have a header and left menu section that remain constant, with only the centre piece changing, you need to use frames.
In dreamweaver, you go to Insert > Frames > Top Nested Left.
This will create a header frame that goes across the whole page, and a left menu that starts from the bottom of the header frame.
When using frames, bear in mind that each frame window is its own .html file, and there is also a parent .html file that contains the entire frame set (called frameset).
When you go to save this document in dreamweaver, you will notice that it goes to save 3 files, and the above comment is the reason why this occurs.
Also you will notice that when you click into each frame, the filename changes (shown in the tab at the bottom of the WYSIWYG window in Dreamweaver. To make your life easier, I would suggest that you save these frames immediately by clicking into each frame individually and selecting File > Save Frame As, and once you have saved the top, left and middle frames, click on File > Save All and this will prompt you to chose a filename for the entire frameset (the file that houses all these frames). Commonly people would save the entire frameset as index.htm as this is the default filename for your domain name.
Now that it has all been saved, your index.htm will be what people land on, and the index.htm will load up (example filenames) header.htm, leftmenu.htm, centrepage1.htm.
On the left, if the left will be your menu, to ensure that new pages are only loaded in to the centre screen, you must highlight your hyperlink and chose Modify > Link Target > mainFrame. This will ensure that any pages hyperlinked are open in the main frame. By Default, a link in the left or header frames will open inside itself, and look real nasty.
The other issue with frames is that content is larger than the framesize. What will happen then, is you will end up will scroll bars on the header and/or left menu, and that just looks unprofessional. The grey lines that appear in Dreamweaver and separate your frames, do not show in web browsers, so you can still have what appears to be a standard fixed place website, but in actual fact, you have a framed site.
The benefit to using frames is, for example, the ease in which you can update a header, footer or menu section of a website by only editing 1 html file per section, as opposed to updating every single page that contains these headers, footers and menu bars.
When it comes to your rollover animations, you will need to create 2 jpeg's per button, 1 for a normal state, and 1 for an over state. Once you have 2 images for each (each image will need to represent the effect you are after for each state), you go to Insert > Interactive Images > Rollover Image. From there you can select the two images, and the URL for the hyperlink.
For a dialog box to open up, you will need to google some java script. I've never used that myself, so I can't help you there.
I hope all of this has helped.
John
