Web Designer Blog

While waiting our SEO series to come out, I showcased for you pretty huge and comprehensive navigation menu and button tutorial article. All of those tutorials are selected carefully just featuring here, the most high quality ones.

Navigation is very important aspect in every web-design, because it is usually the place where people will click the most as well as notice creative and usable buttons. Really all we need is to get visitor remember our site! To complete and sharpen you need to use menu builder here, actually version doesn’t matter, I am sure everything can be completed in menu builders!

Let’s get started and learn how to create shiny, clean, stylish, glossy or even 3D navigation menus! Hope you will enjoy this article!

Read on »

Float Menu is a web menu used for site navigation, which locates in a fixed position on the webpage. This float menu enables to scroll along scroll bar, and always keep visible no matter how long your page is and how viewers change the window size. Generally, web menu is done by HTML, CSS and jQuery; but it is a difficulty to create such a float menu for web design newbies or if you face urgent design task while time is limited. Maybe, using DHTML menu builder is an easy way for all of us to build float menu in minutes.

Sothink DHTML Menu is an ultimate drop down menu builder; it can build JavaScript menus with simple steps. Besides float menu, DHTML Menu enables to create lots of functional menus, like scroll menu, highlight menu, multi-column menu, and disable items and separators and non-English menu. Now, let’s create float menu in the program:

View float menu sample, and it stays visible even if you scroll down a web page. They’re animated, so they move up and down as you scroll the browser window up or down.

Steps:

1.    Start DHTML menu from Built-in Template.

2.    Set menu type as Float to create Float menu

• Check “Global > Menu Type” in Tasks panel, and enter the property panel on the bottom. Input name for this menu and check “Float” option here.
  
• Check “Global > General” in Tasks panel, and enter the property panel on the bottom. Input value as coordinate to float menu on web page. Now preview menu, you will see the menu placed in a fixed position.
  
• Still in this panel, check two “Auto-scroll” options to make float  menu scroll along scroll bar.
  

Creating float menu is so easy in DHTML menu builder. To build more functional menus, download Sothink DHTML Menu to make them in minutes.

You are hosting the frameset website, a drop down menu is required to navigate the website; but the common DHTML menu are unable to popup its sub menu in another frame page. In this case, you need a special cross-frame menu to navigate your frameset website:

let’s check the cross-frame menu sample:

Highlight Frameset Menu

Two Cross-frame Menus in One Page

Highlight Cross-Frame Menu

All the cross-frame menus are made by Sothink DHTML Menu. If you are interested in building cross-frame menu, download this cross-frame menu builder to create your menu sample.

As you know, JavaScript menu have a crucial role in indexing of web sites by search spiders. Now JavaScript menu builder can generate Google XML Sitemap and search engine friendly code, which enable spider to crawl menu info including links and captions, and therefore all pages of your web site will be indexed by the search engines. Google XML Sitemap and search engine friendly code are available for crawling by the spider from Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your website.

Generate Google XML Sitemap by JavaScript Menu Builder

After finishing JavaScript menu configuration in DHTML menu builder, you can check “Tools > Generate Google XML Sitemap…” to open dialog. And then input domain name and check the options to generate Google XML sitemap and save as XML files based on your JavaScript menu. Finally, submit this sitemap to Google, JavaScript menu’s link will be indexed and crawled much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.

Generate Search Engine Friendly Code by JavaScript Menu Builder

After finishing JavaScript menu configuration in DHTML menu builder, you can check “Tools > Generate Search Engine Friendly Code…” to open dialog. The codes which are friendly to search engine will be auto-generated, you can click the button “Copy All” to paste these codes between the tag of HTML. Your website will be crawled easily by spider and list in the top rank of searched result.

JavaScript menu itself cannot be indexed by search engines, it is well-known fact and main drawback of JavaScript menus. Now JavaScript menu builder can assist in making Google XML Sitemap and special search engine friendly codes for search engine.

The menus made of scripts are great space savers for complicated websites, but the script drop down menu are difficult to build.

Let’s Do Menu Script First

 
 
 
 
 
 
Step 1: The script for the sample above uses three external files: anylinkmenu.js, menucontents.js and anylinkmenu.css. Download them first.

Step 2: Add the codes to the HEAD section of your page. (check the detailed codes at this page)

Step 3: All that’s left is setting up your link(s) so a menu drops down. The sample HTML demonstrates 3 links, one with the menu dropping down onMouseover, and the other, onClick: (check the detailed codes at this page)

Step 4: To modify the script drop down menu later, you have to customize the script menu’s contents and anchor links, and initialize the menu by scripts every time, which is very complicated and takes much time.

Furthermore, the script menu looks simple, ordinary, and not attractive enough.

Now Check DHTML Menu Builder

While, DHTML Menu Builder usually refers to a program that helps you to create script menus without much knowledge on scripts.

If a script menu is done by a menu builder, it will be much easier and faster. Usually we use Sothink DHTML Menu, a powerful and useful script menu editor. Check the script drop down menu created by the program below:

View the more script drop down menus here

1. When you launch Sothink DHTML Menu, it will pop up a window to ask you to choose templates, so pick up the one you like among them for script drop down menus. With the plentiful templates in the program, pretty and fashionable script drop down menus are easy to get.
2. After selecting the templates, what you need to do is just edit the text, color, background or anything else for the script drop down menus. And you can refer to the tutorials here for details.
3. Next, you can publish your script drop down menus to webpage, however, you needn’t write any scripts but only copy and paste the scripts which are generated by the program automatically to some specified area. Here is the tutorial.
4. If you want to modify the script drop down menu, you can just open the existing .PGT file (the project file of Sothink DHTML Menu) for the script drop down menu, make some changes with some clicks, and publish it to the website for updates.

See the Table Below for a Comparison

 
 
 
 
 
 
It is plain that menu builder is more simple to use. With a lot of templates in the builder, you could create script drop down menus in various styles; and it is also easy to modify and maintain the menu later. Moreover, the most important one is that you even need not to know much about scripts at all!