June 21, 2009

June 2009 Meeting Report:
Adding Up the Menu Options

At our June meeting, we discussed the elements of navigation menus and then saw how those elements worked on some sample menus.

We first considered the HTML foundation for a menu. Looking at a couple of major sites, we saw that the unordered list seems to be the most accepted format, but a simple sentence list is often used for secondary menus, like footers. Compare the White House site with the New York Times. Load them in Firefox, turn off styles, and check the actual HTML of the different navigation sections, both in body and in footer.

We then looked at the below online tutorials to see how menus can be styled with just CSS and no graphics.

Horizontal Navigation using list property - two methods

Button effect with only background colors

Next season, we will continue with using graphics, as illustrated in this Web Designer Wall tutorial that we looked at briefly.

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