Building a Responsive, Mobile-First Navigation Menu. This tutorial will demonstrate how to develop a rather complex responsive navigation menu using the “ Mobile-First Approach “. The aim is to present mobile users with a pseudo-native, touch-conducive and interactive interface that enables them to navigate the website with ease. Tablet users will be presented with an appropriately-sized navigation whilst desktop users will be presented with a glorious drop-down navigation menu. The whole point of the practice of web design is to present appropriate user interfaces that feel native to the users’ environment. Due to the rising number of users from mobile and tablet devices, the “ Responsive Web Design ” approach has become a necessity in modern day web design.
There is a new commandment in web design practice: Thou shall not discriminate against devices. Demonstration Responsive Navigation Menu – Click to Open Demonstration Mobile-first approach for development. Existing Responsive Navigation Patterns Prerequisites <! How to Create a Responsive Navigation. One of the trickiest parts to be responsified on a website is “the Navigation”, this part is really important for the website accessibility, as this is one of the ways visitors jump over the web pages. There are actually many ways to create responsive web site navigation and even some jQuery plugins are available to do it in a second.
However, rather than applying an instant solution, in this post, we are going to walk you through on how to build a simple navigation from the ground and using the CSS3 media queries and a little jQuery to display it in a small screen size like the smartphones properly. So, let’s just get started. First of all, let’s add the meta viewport inside the head tag. This meta viewport tag is required for our page to scale properly inside any screen size, particularly in the mobile viewport. …and then add the following snippet as the navigation markup inside the body tag. As you can see above, we have six primary menu links and added one more link after them. Styles. Create WordPress Menus - The Ultimate Guide. WordPress had been using the conceptual term ‘menu’ as a mysterious feature until version 3.0. Presenting the new customization admin options back then revealed a whole new world for developers and users to tune up their themes and easily modify the standard navigation – horizontal or vertical components.
If you want to squeeze the juice out of your menus, check out that Ultimate Guide to WordPress Menus! What makes WordPress 3.0 menus so fancy? Since version 3.0, WordPress supports custom menu alterations. I do have menus with my standard install as well, don’t I? Most themes (including the default WordPress 3.0 Twenty Ten theme and the Twenty Eleven theme to be released in WordPress 3.2) support navigation menus.
How to enable custom menus in my theme? The standard post-install WordPress themes are preconfigured for you and include that customization functionality. This would bond your theme to the core functionality for custom menus. How to call an existing menu in my theme? Summary. Pull Down for Navigation. 27th February, 2012 Tom Kenny Tutorials Mobile screen real estate is at a premium and one of the biggest problems to solve is how to display navigation when screen widths become quite narrow so I decided to have a look and see what I could come up with using some nifty CSS and a touch of jQuery.
Trying to condense a navigation down onto a mobile screen tends to push the actual content of the site down and out of initial view. Luke Wroblewski has explored some solutions in Mobile First but I’ve developed something that I haven’t come across just yet. In fact, in the process of writing this tutorial, Brad Frost released a great roundup of responsive navigation patterns so I suppose this could be an additional technique to add to his list. Pull Down to Refresh Pull down to refresh was a concept first introduced to the mobile world by Loren Brichter in his Twitter app, Tweetie as you can see in the screenshot here. Pull Down for Navigation Demo Step 1 The HTML Step 2 The CSS Step 3 The jQuery.
Responsive Navigation Patterns. Update: I’ve also written about complex navigation patterns for responsive design. Top and left navigations are typical on large screens, but lack of screen real estate on small screens makes for an interesting challenge. As responsive design becomes more popular, it’s worth looking at the various ways of handling navigation for small screen sizes. Mobile web navigation must strike a balance between quick access to a site’s information and unobtrusiveness. Here’s some of the more popular techniques for handling navigation in responsive designs: There are of course advantages and disadvantages of each method and definitely some things to look out for when choosing what method’s right for your project. Top Nav or “Do Nothing” Approach One of the easiest-to-implement solutions for navigation is to simply keep it at the top.
Pros Cons Height issues- Height matters in mobile. Responsive navigation breaking to multiple lines on small screens In the Wild Resources The Select Menu The Toggle In The Wild.