June 2006 Meeting Report -- Navigation Menus

The June meeting of the PACS CSS Workshop was the last until September.

This month, we covered different techniques for using CSS to style navigation menus. We used a number of online resources to demonstrate different techniques for taking a set of links and styling them to display as interesting and functional navigation elements. The sites are below, and I encourage you to try their examples in order to develop your CSS abilities. (These links open into new browser windows.)

3D button effect

Go to number 9 on this list of favorite tricks to see the 3D effect that we demonstrated. The rest of the tricks are worth your time as well.

Menu tutorial

We followed this tutorial from one of our favorite CSS sites to create a vertical menu from a simple line of links and then a horizontal menu from the same CSS by just adding a couple of properties.

Tableless rollover navigation bars

This simple CSS creates a nice horizontal menu bar with a rollover effect.

List-u-Like CSS Generator

Instead of writing your CSS and guessing how it will look, try this generator to just make your property and value selections and then preview the results.

Tabbed menus

This site has a whole collection of different tabbed menus using CSS. The site says they are free. Just look at the source for the techniques used.

June 10 Meeting Announcement

The next meeting of the PACS CSS Workshop will be this coming Saturday, June 10, at the usual 9-10 hour. This month's PACS meeting is on the second Saturday of the month due to the school schedule.

This month we will work some more on styling navigation menus. We started last month, and we will continue in June with vertical menus, then move on to horizontal menus. Depending on time, we may be able to look at some more advanced ideas.

This meeting is the last of the season. We will take the summer off, and if there is interest in continuing this workshop, we will pick up again in September. Please give me some feedback.

This month's PACS meeting is particularly rich with web-related topics. In addition to the usual workshops, the guest speaker at the main meeting will be Eric Pascarello, who will talk about AJAX and the new developments that are changing the way we use the internet. Eric will also be the speaker at the Web Design SIG at 1-2. These are sessions you don't want to miss. More information is available at the PACS website.

Finally, I have blogged an interesting new website called Vitamin (see below).

Hope to see you all Saturday.

Vitamin - A resource for web developers, designers and entrepreneurs

A new online magazine called Vitamin - A resource for web developers, designers and entrepreneurs looks as though it will be an excellent source for information on all things web-related.

The site is the product of Carson Systems, a company I have seen mentioned as sponsoring some high-level web development seminars. The list of advisors to this new site is impressive and includes a lot of people whose names are easily recognizable.

I suggest checking out Vitamin and adding the RSS feed to your reader.