jappler.com

There have been two great menu and navigation techniques I have used over the last few years:

1. Sliding Doors of CSS
2. Sons of Suckerfish (for drop down menus)

I have used both of these techniques on several web sites, but crazily not together…until a week ago when a client decided they wanted to move away from their antiquated menus that relied on hundreds of lines of javascript, HTML tables, and over 40 image files (for seven tabs). This technique works in IE 6, IE 7, Firefox, and Safari.

After I had put the code into place I thought it might be helpful for others to see exactly how it is done. These techniques give you a lot of flexibility with very lightweight code.

Code/Files Needed

1. Two tab images (left and right, with both an active and hover (highligted) option
2. Sub-menu arrow (not required)
3. Sons of Suckerfish javascript
4. CSS for both the drop downs and the sliding doors techniques
5. Menu list code (your menu items)

Two tab images
The sliding door technique is great because you do not need to make tab specific images, nor do you need to worry about the tab length – it is all taken care of by two images and some CSS. For this example, I am going to use two basic tab images that I quickly created for this example:

1. Left
2. Right

Sub-menu arrow (not required)
If you want to easily let your visitors know you have a sub-menu within your menus, add in a sub-menu arrow.

Sons of Suckerfish javascript
After years of using nasty javascript – it is refreshing to see that this technique only requires a few lines of javascript (check out the javascript).

CSS for both the drop downs and the sliding doors techniques
The CSS for the drop down menus and the tabbed navigation is pretty slick (check out the CSS).

Menu list code (your menu items)
The menu list code is the actual menus/tabs. The code can be dynamically created by using something like wp_list_pages() in WordPress, or you can create the code yourself. I have created some sample code for this example.

Everything put together
Now that you have an understanding of all the files and code involved, let’s see everything put together This is a very good way to have sustainable code/files for a small or large web site when dealing with navigation.

Questions, comments? Contact me!