50 Beautiful And User-Friendly Navigation Menus - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement Usability is an essential goal of any website, and usable navigation is something every website needs. It determines where users are led and how they interact with the website. Without usable navigation, content becomes all but useless. Menus need to be simple enough for the user to understand, but also contain the elements necessary to guide the user through the website — with some creativity and good design thrown in. Below we present over 50 excellent navigation menus — we feature CSS-based design solutions, CSS+JavaScript-based menus and Flash-designs. Please also consider our previous articles: CSS-Based Navigation Menus: Modern Solutions1, which lists modern solutions for CSS-based navigation.Navigation Menus: Trends and Examples2 is an inspirational collection of navigation menus. 1.
Loodo3A colorful menu that adds to the feel of the website. Acko.net4Steven Wittens takes a look at the navigation menu from a quite unusual perspective. Artgeex27Vivid typography in use. 2. Create a Reusable CSS Menu with Photoshop » HTML & CSS, Layout, Photoshop » Design Festival. In web design and development, you’ll find that there are many different techniques to meet a given goal. Some are good, and some are great, but as long as your chosen method works well and looks good, you should use it with confidence. To complete a professional, tailor-made web design, it’s important to understand how to build a navigation menu from start to finish. Your website’s navigation is arguably the most important element besides the site’s structure. Every site visitor will use it to find what they are looking for.
If your menu doesn’t work or doesn’t stand out, the visitors may not know where to go or what to do to find the information they need. Your site’s menu system should reflect the style of your site: You can choose smaller, subtler sizes and fonts, or you can scale up to big spaces and matching typefaces. Step 1: Create the Canvas To get started, open Photoshop and create a document with web settings. Step 2: Setting Up the Menu Step 3: Choosing Your Colors. CSS Menu Generator. Designing Drop-Down Menus: Examples and Best Practices - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement As a general rule, most Web developers, especially usability enthusiasts, say it is bad practice to use drop-down menus because they are confusing, annoying and oftentimes dysfunctional. From a design standpoint, however, drop-down menus are an excellent feature because they help clean up a busy layout. If structured correctly, drop-down menus can be a great navigation tool, while still being a usable and attractive design feature.
Yes, that’s right: drop-down navigation menus can be user-friendly. Just yesterday Jacob Nielsen the results of his recent drop-down menus study1, in which he found out that big, two-dimensional drop-down panels that group navigation options help users to avoid scrolling and can precisely explain the user’s choices with effective use of typography, icons, and tooltips. These panels appear temporarily and disappear on their own when users move the pointer to another top-level option or to a “regular” part of the screen. Where To Use Drop-Down Menus. Horizontal Navigation Menus: Trends, Patterns, and Best Practices - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement The horizontal navigation menu has become a mainstay in Web design.
It is safe to say that nowadays most websites use some form of horizontal navigation to facilitate content browsing. The dominance of horizontal navigation over vertical (i.e. down a sidebar) is obviously due to the design and content limitations of the latter. Notably, CNN discovered those limitations1 before switching from vertical to horizontal a few years back. There are, however, many styles of horizontal navigation in modern Web design. Some offer usability advantages for certain types of websites, while others are aesthetically better. In this article, we will focus on a variety of techniques and best practices to improve the usability of horizontal navigation bars, and we will note less effective styles. Use Familiar Names For Links Let’s start off with a usability tip that applies to any navigation bar. Impulse Development2 Clearly Distinguish Primary And Secondary Sections Primary links (e.g. Sharify7. How to Create a Flashy Menu Using CSS » HTML & CSS » Design Festival.
Module Tabs in Web Design: Best Practices and Solutions - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement A module tab is a User Interface (UI) design pattern where content is separated into different panes, and each pane is viewable one at a time. The user requests content to be displayed by clicking (or in some instances hovering over) the content’s corresponding tab control.
Module tabs are seeing an increase of use as websites and web applications push for optimizing web page screen areas without sacrificing the amount of information presented at once. For example, in weblogs, they are used in secondary content sections (such as the sidebar) to present relevant and interesting information such as a listing of blog posts which users can interact with to get to web pages quicker. This inevitably allows for an unobtrusive and compact manner of presenting content. This article discusses the use of the module tabs design pattern for use in websites and web-based applications. Anatomy of a Module Tab Area When to Use Module Tabs Information that is related Allow Keyboard Navigation. Showcase Of Beautiful Vertical Navigation Designs - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement Go to any website and you’re guaranteed to find one thing: a navigation menu.
Navigation menus enable visitors to move from page to page; without them, we would have no way to conveniently explore websites. Perhaps this is why designers, information architects, usability researchers and user experience specialists invest so much time and resources into devising aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly navigation systems. Website navigation menus generally come in one of two orientations: vertical and horizontal. Horizontal navigation menus display items side by side. You might also like these related posts: Showcase Of Beautiful Vertical Navigation Designs Riot Industries5 The vertical navigation in this portfolio website is simple and clean in looks yet robust in functionality and interaction. Village Version6 Here, you can see one of the benefits of vertical navigation: it allow for highly compact and modular menus that appear distinct from the rest of the layout.
R.I.P. Showcase of Interesting Navigation Designs - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement Everyone is always looking for interesting and effective ways to organize their website and allow users to move about and find things. But there’s a fine line between unexpected and unusable. Three points to consider in any navigation scheme are consistency, user expectations and contextual clues. If page is long and provides different levels of navigation, will users be able to find their way through the site and use proper navigation quickly? Forcing visitors to use certain keystrokes to navigate, rather than what they’re used to, might be novel, but is that effective if you have to explain instructions prominently on your home page? Here are some examples for your reading pleasure. Made by Water A JavaScript-Powered Vertical Fun The large bold headings and modern color palette on Made by Water1 feel fresh and fun. 2Vertical navigation buttons with icons.
The other problem with the navigation is the yellow “up” arrow that is displayed in the footer of the page. Made in Haus.