President of WebFX. Bill has over 25 years of experience in the Internet marketing industry specializing in SEO, UX, information architecture, marketing automation and more. William’s background in scientific computing and education from Shippensburg and MIT provided the foundation for MarketingCloudFX and other key research and development projects at WebFX.
We’ve seen innovative ways in which designers and developers have used CSS to innovate upon its shortcomings. The design of a site is just as important as SEO for your client’s business, so these tips should help you with your web design. Here, you’ll find some of the best ways to use CSS for your website navigation.
You’ll find a variety of techniques that truly showcase the capabilities of CSS. In this article, you will find a collection of excellent navigation techniques that use the CSS to provide users with an impressive interface for their web design. These techniques are great for a broad range of industries.
Whether your client is a realtor or a car dealership, these techniques should help improve their web design.
This another great CSS menu Stu Nicholls that’s unique – hovering over a menu item reveals a submenu. If you want get started with this menu just simple view the source code. Demo in page.
2. Pure CSS hover menu
View Demo In this CSS technique, you’ll learn to create a vertically-oriented CSS hover menu that reveals a submenu when a menu item is hovered on.
3. Matte CSS Menu
View Demo Matte is a simple CSS menu with rounded corners using two small images only from 13styles. It is maintained by David Appleyard who has lots of simple and advanced CSS-based menus.
4. CSS Blur Menu
View Demo This CSS technique shows you a method from creating a menu that blurs sibling menu items when you hover over an item.
5. CSS Navigation with Glowing Icons
View Demo This beautiful CSS menu technique can be created by following along this extensive step-by-step tutorial.
6. CSS Sliding Door using only 1 image
View Demo This slick CSS menu is based on the Sliding Doors technique but only uses one image.
7. Navigation Matrix Reloaded
View Demo This stylish navigation menu technique uses a CSS sprite.
8. CSS Horizontal Menu
View DemoUpdate: this no longer exists. Ian Main provides a great set of free CSS menus that are stylish and easy to use.
9. Woody CSS Menu
Woody is a pre-made CSS menu that’s ready to use and has been tested in IE6, IE 7, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome. Demo in the page.
Learn a technique for mimicking Apple’s image rollover CSS menu by following along this menu tutorial. Demo in page.
14. CSS Hoverbox
Inspired by the Hoverbox Image Gallery technique developed by Nathan Smith, CSS Hoverbox leans on the background-position CSS property to superimpose rollover images on top of neighboring menu items. Demo in page.
This is an experimental CSS menu that allows you to create a scaling menu that adjusts depending on the browser’s width. Demo in page.
16. Simple CSS-based drop-down menu
View Demo This is a very basic CSS-based drop-down menu that’s excellent for trying to grok the technique involved in creating drop-down menu that doesn’t require client-side scripting.
17. Two Level Horizontal Navigation in CSS
View DemoVeerle Pieters provides a CSS menu and tutorial created using text-indent CSS property.
View Demo In this technique, you’ll witness a method for creating a CSS-based accordion menu.
20. Tabbed Navigation Using CSS
Here is another excellent method for creating a module tab interface based purely on CSS. Use the tabs in the page to learn about the instructions on how to implement this technique.
21. CSS Mini Tabs (the UN-tab, tab)
View Demo This CSS menu on the popular web design agency SimpleBits shows a way for creating mini tabs. View the source code on the demo page to learn how it works (the code is inline and formatted well for readability for your convenience).
View Demo This A List Apart CSS menu technique is for a fly-out submenu that appears on the right of the top-level menu, leveraging the position: absolute CSS property to move the submenu to the appropriate level.
View Demo Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street shows us the basic principles of turning an unordered list into a navigation bar – it’s a great starting point for beginners to learn about building a semantic HTML structure and then styling it with CSS.