Filtering Content on a Page?

Question

Hey guys, I've found myself in a bit of a quandary.
A client wanted me to design a responsive (Though he didn't know that was the word at the time) website for his new restaurant. He wanted the user to be able to do things such as order their food online, contact us and book the restaurant as a venue. There were other elements of course but those were the three main features he wanted.
I accepted the job as it seemed easy enough.
What I didn't realise though was the size of his menu. He did of course mention that he had a larger than average menu but that he managed to split it up into a "Few" different sections (Such as "Starters", "Salads", "Breads".
It turns out that a "Few" sections turned out to be over a dozen, meaning over a hundred different pieces of food. When he told me that his menu was larger than average I thought about having the button "Order Online" on the navigation bar with a drop down menu leading to different pages, each contain one section of the menu. Of course, I can't do that when there are over 12 different sections because then it looks completely stupid.
I now need some way to actually display it on the webpage. So I decided on like a mini navigation bar within the page itself located to the left of the main body. This navigation bar (Vertical and taking up less than a fifth of the screen) should control what is shown on the right side.
The page itself shouldn't have to reload, rather only the small section on the right.
Thanks for the help guys.

Answer 1

ashton knight wrote:
Hey guys, I've found myself in a bit of a quandary.
A client wanted me to design a responsive (Though he didn't know that was the word at the time) website for his new restaurant. He wanted the user to be able to do things such as order their food online, contact us and book the restaurant as a venue. There were other elements of course but those were the three main features he wanted.
I accepted the job as it seemed easy enough.
What I didn't realise though was the size of his menu. He did of course mention that he had a larger than average menu but that he managed to split it up into a "Few" different sections (Such as "Starters", "Salads", "Breads".
It turns out that a "Few" sections turned out to be over a dozen, meaning over a hundred different pieces of food. When he told me that his menu was larger than average I thought about having the button "Order Online" on the navigation bar with a drop down menu leading to different pages, each contain one section of the menu. Of course, I can't do that when there are over 12 different sections because then it looks completely stupid.
I now need some way to actually display it on the webpage. So I decided on like a mini navigation bar within the page itself located to the left of the main body. This navigation bar (Vertical and taking up less than a fifth of the screen) should control what is shown on the right side.
The page itself shouldn't have to reload, rather only the small section on the right.
Thanks for the help guys.
Humm you mention responisve. How do you propose to allocate room for these menus on small screen if you think it looks stupid on a large screen. Fair enough it looks like you have decided to have a vertcial menu to the left of the page - where are you going to put that on a small screen?
Also I'm a bit concerned about the term 'filtering content on a page'. You may or may not be using th incorrect terminology heer which confuses people into thinking youre using a database to store the products?
I read it as though youre just going to have a menu list down the left side of your page ie Starters, Mains, Desserts etc then you are just going to build a flat pages containing the products for each menu category and want to bring this page into the box on the right hand side of your main page onClick, but maybe not?