Design Shack » Navigation

Code a Web Magazine Style Dropdown Navigation Menu

Jake Rocheleau — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 22:15:34 +0000

Frontend web development has grown into a very popular niche. With the expansion of jQuery more web designers are beginning to create fantastic animations and page effects. The possibilities are limitless!

In this tutorial we’ll be creating a magazine-style drop down nav menu. This will be created with some fancy CSS3 techniques to work in standards-compliant browsers. Even if you are shaky with jQuery you should be able to keep up with this little bit of code, and possibly learn something new. Check out the live demo script in my example.

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Try it Out

View Live Demo – Download Source

Structuring our Page HTML

We should start off by constructing the basic page layout. I’ve done this in HTML with an unordered list for menu links. Both the CSS styles and jQuery library are excluded externally which saves a bit of space. Added below is the heading to our HTML code.


<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>DesignShack Sexy Magazine-Style Dropdown Menu</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" media="all" />
</head>

The jQuery library v1.6.2 is hosted on Google’s servers for web developers to use. This can often cut off some of the load to your own servers. Differences are especially noticeable if you are processing tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors daily. I’ve also set my doctype to HTML5, not that it should affect our script.

Moving down a bit in the code let’s take a look at the inner body content. Below is a copy/paste of everything inside the body tag. I have removed the final jQuery code since we’ll be looking at that in a later section.

<div id="head">
	<div class="wrap">
		<h1><img src="images/logo.jpg" alt="Blog Magazine Logo" /></h1>
	</div>
</div>
 
<div class="wrap">
	<ul id="nav">
		<li><a href="#">Homepage</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">About the Mag</a>
			<ul>
				<li><a href="#">Company</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">Authors</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">Write for Us?</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">Advertising</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">Get in Touch</a></li>
			</ul>
		</li>
		<li><a href="#">Freebies</a>
			<ul>
				<li><a href="#">PSD</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">AI Vectors</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">Patterns</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">Icons</a></li>
			</ul>			
		</li>
		<li><a href="#">Tutorials</a>
			<ul>
				<li><a href="#">HTML5</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">CSS3</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">jQuery</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">PHP MySQL</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">Ruby on Rails</a></li>
			</ul>
		</li>
		<li><a href="#">Web Tools</a>
			<ul>
				<li><a href="#">Performance</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">Browser Testing</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">CMS Plugins</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">Cheat Sheets</a></li>
			</ul>
		</li>
		<li><a href="#">Originals</a>
			<ul>
				<li><a href="#">Website Design</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">Mobile</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">User Interface</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">Freelancing</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">Inspiration</a></li>
			</ul>
		</li>
	</ul>
</div>

So this should finish up our main HTML structure. All the nested lists are using ul elements which are positioned inside a parent list item. Not too difficult if you have a basic grasp in web design and coding. So let’s move right ahead into the CSS styles.

Designing with CSS

I’ll break down each segment of the small style.css file attached with the demo code. We start with a group block resetting margins/padding for the whole document. A simple man’s page reset, really.

* { margin: 0; padding: 0; }
body {font-family: Arial, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; color: #232323; }
 
/* @group structure */
#head { background: #e1ecf6; height: 100px; padding-top: 15px; border-bottom: 1px solid #d5dce8; }
.wrap { width: 800px; margin: 0 auto; }

The head content will hold a small logo graphic I made in Photoshop. I’ve used .wrap as a class so we can re-use the same styles with our nav menu. This wrapper creates an 800px content div and centers it on the page.

The next group is a bit larger, providing styles for the root nav menu and its list items. Note the #nav selector is on our original unordered list element, so we can use this to select all sub-ul elements later on.

/* @group core nav menu */
#nav { margin: 0; padding: 0; list-style: none; border-left: 1px solid #d5dce8; border-right: 1px solid #d5dce8; border-bottom: 1px solid #d5dce8; border-bottom-left-radius: 4px; -moz-border-radius-bottomleft: 4px; -webkit-border-bottom-left-radius: 4px; border-bottom-right-radius: 4px; -moz-border-radius-bottomright: 4px; -webkit-border-bottom-right-radius: 4px; height: 50px; padding-left: 15px; padding-right: 15px; background: #edf3f7; }
 
#nav li { float: left; display: block; background: none; position: relative; z-index: 999; margin: 0 1px; }
 
#nav li a { display: block; padding: 0; font-weight: 700; line-height: 50px; text-decoration: none;  color: #818ba3; zoom: 1; border-left: 1px solid transparent; border-right: 1px solid transparent; padding: 0px 12px; }
#nav li a:hover, #nav li a.hov { background-color: #fff; border-left: 1px solid #d5dce8; border-right: 1px solid #d5dce8; color: #576482; }

On the root UL I have added 3 solid borders: left, right, and bottom. The top border spans the entire website and this is added in the header area. I’ve additionally rounded the bottom left and right corners. This technique done in CSS3 using -moz, -webkit, and the standard border-radius properties.

The list items are given a z-index of 999 to appear above all other elements. So in this way we would hover off the original li onto our subnav and lose the popup. Instead the li element expands to take up the full height of our new sliding menu and stay on top as we mouse over links. Also position: relative; is added to properly use absolute positioning on the inner list.

The anchor links aren’t too interesting in themselves. They highlight with a white background on hover with two additional borders to the left and right side. On the final hover selector I added another class .hov to be used by jQuery. This will make it so when you move the mouse cursor over sub-menu links the original nav link stays hovered! Pretty neat.

Sub-Navigation Menu Styles

This last CSS code will style our sub menu links. We use absolute positioning to move around our sub-ul element directly to the top of its container. Also a great drop shadow effect using some new CSS3 properties.

/* @group subnav */
#nav ul { position: absolute; left: 1px; display: none; margin: 0; padding: 0; list-style: none; -moz-box-shadow: 0 1px 3px rgba(0,0,0,0.2); -o-box-shadow: 0 1px 3px rgba(0,0,0,0.2); box-shadow: 0 1px 3px rgba(0,0,0,0.2); -webkit-box-shadow: 0 1px 3px rgba(0,0,0,0.2); padding-bottom: 3px; }	
#nav ul li { width: 180px; float: left; border-top: 1px solid #fff; text-align: left; }
#nav ul li:hover { border-left: 0px solid transparent; border-right: 0px solid transparent; }

The individual properties I’ve used and their supporting browsers can get a bit confusing. Below is a small translation guide.

-moz-box-shadow – Firefox/Mozilla Engine
-o-box-shadow – Opera
-webkit-box-shadow – Standard WebKit browsers, Google Chrome or Safari
box-shadow – Most others including Microsoft Internet Explorer

Each sub-nav list item is set 180px in width. This defines the max size our menu will pop out to be. If you port over the code you should change this to accommodate sizes in your own template.

#nav ul a { display: block; height: 20px; line-height: 20px; padding: 8px 5px; color: #666; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; text-transform:  uppercase; color: #797979; font-weight: normal; }
#nav ul a:hover { text-decoration: none; border-right-color: transparent; border-left-color: transparent; background: transparent; color: #4e4e4e; }
 
* html #nav ul { margin: 0 0 0 -2px; }

Each sub-menu anchor is set to a height and line-height of 20px. This will keep the menu text centered vertically in each menu block. On hover effect I’ve hidden the borders which are inherited from the parent nav links. All fairly straightforward with CSS styles, and now the final bit of JavaScript to piece it all together.

jQuery Show/Hide Sub Menu

Directly after the final .wrap div our content area ends. So right here I’ve added a new script tag and placed all the jQuery code inside. This makes editing a lot easier, and our code is fairly small anyways.

$(document).ready(function() {	
	$('#nav li').hover(function() {
		$('ul', this).slideDown(200);
		$(this).children('a:first').addClass("hov");
	}, function() {
		$('ul', this).slideUp(100);
		$(this).children('a:first').removeClass("hov");		
	});
});

Start the script by checking if the page document has finished loading. We want to trigger our first function after the user hovers over a list item in the root #nav ul. The first block of function code is made up of two lines.

It targets our inner ul element and adds a slide-down effect to complete in 200 milliseconds. Secondly we need to add the .hov class onto the currently selected anchor link. This keeps the hovered effect in the main link even when moving over sub-navigation links. The second function is our callback parameter for the .hover() method which happens on mouse off.

This is also comprised of 2 simple lines of code. These actually just reverse what we’ve done in the first area. The inner ul is forced to slide up in a quicker animation (100 milliseconds long) and we remove the hover class as well.

View Live Demo – Download Source

Conclusion

I’ve left the menu fairly basic so other designers can tweak the template to fit their own website. It is quite impressive what is possible with just a couple lines in jQuery! If you have implemented anything similar on your own site please let us know. And don’t forget to download and play around with the demo source code.

Top 10 CSS Navigation Menus

David Appleyard — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:42:52 +0000

Creating navigation with CSS is one of the most crucial elements of website design. Get the navigation right, and people will feel welcomed and at home. Get it wrong, and it can spell trouble for your website. This is a great collection of 10 CSS navigation examples and tutorials to get you in the creative mood.

1. CSS Fancy Menu

This article gos through the creation of a custom navigation bar with some cute Javascript effects that will certainly impress your friends. Thanks to the great Mootools library, this beauty is contained in 1.5kb. Not only that, but it’s also cross browser (tested on Internet Explorer 6/7, Firefox and Safari) and accessible!

2. cssMenus

This navigation menu works both vertically and horizontally, being fully compatible with all browsers.

3. Advanced CSS Menu

This tutorial I will show you how to slice up the menu design (step by step) and put them together with CSS. Most of you probably know how to code a horizontal or vertical CSS list menu. Now let’s take it to the next level – code an advanced (un-typical) list menu utilizing the CSS position property.

4. Taming CSS Lists

In this article, I’ll demonstrate how to use CSS to bring unwieldy lists under control. It’s time for you to tell lists how to behave, instead of letting them run wild on your web page. Specific attention is paid to using a list as a vertical CSS menu.

5. Mini Tabs

I came up with these little “mini tabs” for navigation while working on a few projects. They’ll probably appear in the real world eventually. They are generated with pure CSS of course, and require no images.

6. Inverted Sliding Doors Tabs

This is an explanation of how I adapted Doug Bowman’s Sliding Doors technique to work with inverted tabs for a recent redesign of netrelations.se.

7. A collection of free CSS menus

8. A simple gradient CSS menu

9. A walk-through of different CSS navigation techniques

10. Mini sliding navigation

CSS Tabs Rollover Menu

David Appleyard — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:34:30 +0000

Using a tabbed rollover menu in the header of your website can add functionality, as well as making the navigation look good. Doing this in CSS means that you can use it to it’s greatest capacity, easily add or remove tabs and change the colour in different styles.

1. Decide on the Navigational Elements and Colours

It is initially important to decide on which tabs you will want to place on your site, and what the colour scheme will be. You need to have an idea of how many tabs there will be, and what the default background and rollover background colour will be. Make a note of these!

2. How It Works

The tab area is set as a layer, to hover over a specific part of the page – you set this manually, based on where you would like it to be located.

Simply take the CSS code (see below), and change the commented values to fit in with the colour scheme of your website. You can go deeper and change elements such as the height, width and position of the menu bar if you want.

3. Download the CSS Code

Download a copy of the CSS code, then link to it as explained below.

4. Insert the CSS file into your HTML Code

Upload the tabsample.css file to your server, then place the following line in your area to link to the stylesheet.

1	<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="tabsample.css" />

5. Place the Tabs in your HTML Code

OK, so you’ve got all the formatting done for tabs in the CSS file, now you just need to place the correct HTML code in your index.php page.

For each tab you want to display, enter:

<ul id="supernav">
($page=="home") { echo " id="selected""; } else {} ?>>
   <a href="/index.php" title="The Weblog">Blog</a>
</li>
-- Repeat as necessary for other tabs --
</ul>

For each different tab, change the following:

"home" – this is a one word description of the page (for the reason why, see below)
"/index.php" – this is the link to that particular page
"The Weblog" – a description of the page you’re linking to
Blog – the word you want to appear in your navigation bar as a link

Note: It doesn’t really matter where you place this source code, as the position they appear in is set in the CSS file. I would recommend somewhere near the header area.

6. What’s the PHP for?

The PHP code in the above line allows you to have an alternative look and feel for the tab on the current page (see the ‘Blog’ tab above?) Simply place this line underneath the tag of each page of your website: <div class="wp_syntax"><table><tr><td class="line_numbers"><pre>1 </pre></td><td class="code"><pre class="php" style="font-family:monospace;"><?php $page="home"; ?></pre></td></tr></table></div> As before, change <code>"home"</code> section to match that on the tab area. If you do not want to use this functionality or are not using PHP in your pages, replace the code in Step 5 with the following: <div class="wp_syntax"><table><tr><td class="line_numbers"><pre>1 </pre></td><td class="code"><pre class="html4strict" style="font-family:monospace;"><li><a href="/index.php" title="The Weblog">Blog</a></li></pre></td></tr></table></div> You should end up with a menu looking similar to the one at the top of this page in no time. It’s a simple method, and spices up your pages navigation! </article> <article> <h1>Pop Out CSS Menu</h1> David Appleyard — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:33:25 +0000 For websites with a complex hierarchy of navigation, using a pop out menu can allow you to easily find your way to what you want quickly. Using CSS to create one is a snap, and is easy to update. <h2>Example</h2> <a href="/tutorialexamples/popoutmenu/">View the Pop Out Menu Example</a> This is a simple menu, coded semantically with XHTML and CSS. It uses a list to show the menu, and generates the layout of the links from the CSS file. You will need to download our style sheet, download the <a href="/tutorialexamples/popoutmenu/csshover.htc">whatever:hover</a> file from <a href="http://www.xs4all.nl/~peterned/csshover.html">Peter Nederlof</a> to get the menu working in Internet Explorer. You add the following HTML to your code, altering it to fit your needs: <h2>HTML Code</h2> <div class="wp_syntax"><table><tr><td class="line_numbers"><pre>1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 </pre></td><td class="code"><pre class="html4strict" style="font-family:monospace;"><div id="menu"> <ul> <li><h2>Navigation Menu</h2> <ul> <li><a href="" title="">Option 1</a> <ul> <li><a href="" title="">Sub Option 1</a></li> <li><a href="" title="">Sub Option 2</a></li> <li><a href="" title="">Sub Option 3</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> <ul> <li><a href="" title="">Option 2</a> <ul> <li><a href="" title="">Sub Option 1</a></li> <li><a href="" title="">Sub Option 2</a></li> <li><a href="" title="">Sub Option 3</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> <ul> <li><a href="" title="">Option 3</a> <ul> <li><a href="" title="">Sub Option 1</a></li> <li><a href="" title="">Sub Option 2</a></li> <li><a href="" title="">Sub Option 3</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> </li> </ul> </div></pre></td></tr></table></div> <h2>CSS Code</h2> You can download a <a href="/tutorialexamples/popoutmenu/css.txt">copy of the CSS code</a> for this example, then copy and paste it into the <code>head</code> section of your page. Combine that with the whatever:hover file from above in the same directory, and the detailed HTML code – you’ll have a beautiful popup menu in no time! </article> </main></body></html>