How can I prevent elements from showing up in design view of Visual Studio but I still want them to show up on the site.

For example:  I have a div of a site navigation menu.  The menus are using javascript to pop-open (for ex: you hover over FILE and the File Menu pops open).  In design view, the entire menu is displayed on the screen - covering most of my screen making it virtually impossible to do anything in design view of visual studio.  Is there a way I can hide that div from appearing in Visual Studio while still keeping it part of my site.

 I even tried putting it in a panel visible="false" and change it to true in code but "invisible" panels still appear in design view.

Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

You could just comment them out when you want to switch to design view.  Clumsy, I know, but it's better than not having access to design view when you need it.  Also, have you tried putting your navigation in a master page?  I haven't tried it, but that might allow you to edit the placeholders in your master page--where your page-specific content is.

 In any case, if you put your navigation into a master page, you could just comment out all of it on the master page, and then enable it again for the whole site with just one modification to the master page.