Web Designer Blog

One of the most essential part of website is Navigation Menu, Navigation Menu guides visitors how to navigate, explore and interact with the other parts (web pages) of particular website, a navigation menu should be simple and easy to understand, should not conflict the mind of visitors.

SkyTechGeek explored numerous design sites and collected 21 beautiful high quality PSD files, so that users don’t need to explore hundred of Google Pages to find out an appropriate PSD file for their design, Designers and Web developers can use them in their upcoming projects and can give their websites stunning and beautiful look.

1. Simple Navigation Menu

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Successful, eye-catching and mainly user-friendly site navigation sometimes is key to whole web design, because users usually search for navigation at first, when they visit website. Also don’t shy to experiment – portfolio websites can stand out just by that, creating something beautiful and unusual. In our days there are times when whole websites slide over your eyes, possibilities are pretty limitless. Keeping in mind such parameters, I created a list with 10 innovative, beautiful, creative and eye-catching navigation menus for your inspiration in web development process.

1. Panic – Coda

Popular menu already, you may know about this one before.



2. Helmy-Bern

Excellent example of well implemented grunge website and JavaScript navigation



3. SkiAlpine

Simple yet well designed navigation dropdown menu.



4. TapTapTap

Exceptional navigation, you gonna love this one.



5. TheHoleInOurGospel




6. Apple

Whole website is one big beauty and MAC section has interesting sliding menu.



7. Creasenso

Beautiful rollover effects in navigation.



8. Branded07




9. Aperfolio




10. AteBits

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. Vertical navigation menus stack items on top of each other. In this post, we highlight some remarkable vertical navigation menus, for your inspiration.

Riot Industries
The vertical navigation in this portfolio website is simple and clean in looks yet robust in functionality and interaction. Clicking on “Web,” “Print,” or “Identity” filters the thumbnails on the right, and clicking the “About” menu item shifts the navigation to the right, making way for content on the left.

vertical

Village Version
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. Sitting in the top-left corner, just below the website’s name, the menu is one of the first things visitors see (at least with left-to-right languages).

Bruno Souza
This portfolio has a clean and simple navigation design that leaves the visitor to focus on the vibrant content to the right.

Cambrian House
A quite distinctive, original navigation menu with five different typefaces. A bit unusual navigation for a crowdsourcing community.

Comfort Brothers
Navigation menu on the right side of the layout for a change: although the design is basic, almost rudimentary, it works well and is easy to navigate. Navigation menus do not have to look outstanding.

Auberge de l’Ill
This vertical navigation design is elegant and functional. Hovering over a menu item triggers a horizontal animation.

The Hipstery!
This website’s vertical navigation sits right in the middle of where the visitor is focusing when the page first loads. Active menu items are denoted by a pointing hand.

Research at MICA
The navigation design for the Maryland Institute College of Arts demonstrates another advantage of vertical navigation: it shows hierarchy and allows you to group menu items without resorting to drop-down menus, whose sub-menus are displayed only when the user mouses over an item.

Power to the Poster
The vertical navigation design on this website is positioned right below the website’s name, making it prominent without drawing attention from the large rotating banner in the top-right.

From the Couch
The vertical navigation here shows yet another benefit: being able to accommodate more menu items.

Here at Design Shack we love a good navigation menu. Lately we’ve noticed a trend arising around menus that use icons either exclusively in place of text or as a support of additional textual information.

Adding icons to your navigation can not only give you an aesthetic boost but actually make for a quicker visual read of the link. Here’s a collection of over thirty icon-based navigation menus that we found online. We’ll conclude with a few resources you can use to snag some free icons to create your own fancy menus.

KK Media

Bite Club

Mac Rabbit

Narwhal Company

Pixel Resort

Fishing Cactus

Tutorial 9

Envira Media

Duarte Pires

Weblifting

JQuery is a most useful component that can giving your visitor unique experience in a variety of ways, like image sliders, show your twitter stream, image galleries, navigation menu and contact forms.

In this post you’ll find 15 really amazing jQuery navigation menu in tutorials and premium scripts, which will help you to create a navigation menu of your dreams.

Tutorials of Amazing jQuery Navigation Menu

Rocking and Rolling Rounded Menu with jQuery

by Mary Lou
In this tutorial we are going to make use of the incredibly awesome rotating and scaling jQuery patch from Zachary Johnson that can be found here. We will create a menu with little icons that will rotate when hovering. Also, we will make the menu item expand and reveal some menu content, like links or a search box.

Halftone Navigation Menu With jQuery & CSS3

by Martin Angelov
Today we are making a CSS3 & jQuery halftone-style navigation menu, which will allow you to display animated halftone-style shapes in accordance with the navigation links, and will provide a simple editor for creating additional shapes as well.

Beautiful Slide Out Navigation- A CSS and jQuery Tutorial

by Mary Lou
Today I want to show you how to create an amazing slide out menu or navigation for your website. The navigation will be almost hidden – the items only slide out when the user hovers over the area next to them. This gives a beautiful effect and using this technique can spare you some space on your website. The items will be semi-transparent which means that content under them will not be completely hidden.

How To Create a Cool Animated Menu with jQuery

by Chris Spooner
In this tutorial we’ll be building a cool navigation list complete with a sliding hover effect. Learn how to build the concept in Photoshop, lay out the basic HTML elements, style everything up in CSS then tie it all together with a few lines of jQuery to create a semantic, accessible and degradable menu design.

Beautiful Background Image Navigation with jQuery

by Mary Lou
In this tutorial we are going to create a beautiful navigation that has a background image slide effect. The main idea is to have three list items that contain the same background image but with a different position. The background image for each item will be animated to slide into place in different times, creating a really nice effect. The background image sliding direction from the list item in the middle will depend on which item the user was before: coming from the right, it will slide from the left and vice versa.

Animated Navigation with CSS & jQuery

by Soh Tanaka
As I was checking out some flash sites for inspiration, I ran across a couple websites that had some nice navigation effects. I’m not a huge fan of wildly animated navs, but these had simple and elegant roll over effects that I liked. I decided to imitate the effect with CSS and jQuery, and would like to share this technique today.

A Fresh Bottom Slide Out Menu with jQuery

by Mary Lou
In this tutorial we will create a unique bottom slide out menu. This large menu will contain some title and a description of the menu item. It will slide out from the bottom revealing the description text and some icon. We will use some CSS3 properties for some nice shadow effects and jQuery for the interaction.

How to Make a Smooth Animated Menu with jQuery

by Zach Dunn
Ever seen some excellent jQuery navigation that left you wanting to make one of your own? Today we’ll aim to do just that by building a menu and animate it with some smooth effects.

Overlay Effect Menu with jQuery

by Mary Lou
In this tutorial we are going to create a simple menu that will stand out once we hover over it by covering everything except the menu with a dark overlay. The menu will stay white and a submenu area will expand. We will create this effect using jQuery.

CSS Dock Menu

by Nick La
If you are a big Mac fan, you will love this CSS dock menu. It is using Jquery library and Fisheye component from Interface and some of my icons. It comes with two dock position: top and bottom.

Little Boxes Menu with jQuery

by Mary Lou
Today we will create a menu out of little boxes that animate randomly when a menu item is clicked. The clicked menu item expands and reveals a content area for some description or links. When the item is clicked again, the boxes will come back, reconstructing the initial background image.

Premium jQuery Scripts for Cute Menu Navigation

SV Animated Menu Pack 2

by SplitV
This is a set of 4 animated menu scripts. All are stand alone, requiring no external libraries or frameworks. They are extremely small at 1-2kb a piece uncompressed. If you compress them they are all closer to 1-1.5kb. These scripts make it possible to create great menus with flash like effects very easily.

Nice Menu V1.0

by Alexandra1710
A new way to slide between 2 level huge menu.
easy to use, valid html and css code
works in all majors browsers
easy to plug and play script to your website / blog or gallery

Super menu pack (10 menus)

by VanKarWai
Super menu pack is a collection of 10 cool menus, 5 in pure css and 5 using jQuery framework for customize or layout with your websites or applications and projects.

It’s perfect for anyone who wants to give a special touch to their designs or find a starting point. I tried to create a collection as varied as possible in style and appearance to give you choice. Thinking in design working with code.

Cute Menu – 8 transitions pack

by arl1nd
Cute Menu is very simple to embed to your HTML code. It’s requirements are only JavaScript and CSS support.

Article source: http://www.dynamicwp.net/

Pop up menu is visible and placed on the top for majority websites. For some websites, the web designers want to navigate the website by DHTML menu, but there is no space to place menu, context menu type is the best choice to show menu and it can be shown anywhere just by right-clicking.
Step 1: Create pop up menu from built-in templates

Launch Sothink DHTML Menu, “Startup” window opens, you can start menu from built-in templates or new blank. First, click the name from built-in templates to select the menu; and then, preview menu style in preview window of Startup; last, click “OK” to start menu creation.

Step 2: Choose menu type for the chosen menu

In tasks panel, click “Menu Type” option on the Global panel; and enter the “Global > Menu Type” to set the menu as “Context menu”.

Step 3: Publish menu to website

Menu creation is finished. Click the button “Publish” to choose the best publishing method. After the option is check, you can follow the step to publish your navigation to website. And upload all the resources.

White menu refers to drop down menu which adopts white as the main color to navigate your website. As we known, white is the feasible color to match with all kinds of color, it can create wonderful visual matchable effect with other colors. Similarly, white menus are also wild navigation menu to decorate most websites of different colors. Besides color, white menus can be built in horizontal level, vertical level, tab menu, round-corner menu and multi-column. Next, let’s appreciate changable menu styles:

White menu – horizontal menu with black website

White menu – round corner menu with blue website

White menu – vertical menu with green website

White menu – tab menu with yellow website

White menu – multi-column menu with purple website

What’s DHTML tree menus?

DHTML tree menus are navigation menu used for large scale website. It also known as a links bar or link bar, which pulls down its nodes after mouse movement. It contains hypertext links on web page so as to navigate between the pages of a website, and quick link to the target page.

Why choose this DHTML menu maker?

• Cross-browser navigation menu works excellently on main-stream browsers on various platforms.
• Edit web menu directly in HTML editors as add-on, Dreamweaver, FrontPage included.
• Build SE friendly navigation menu by the useful tool.
• Publish wizard guides publishing the navigation bar, JavaScript menu to website step by step.
• Customizes element for web menu, like font, icon, background, color, border, cursor, effects, alignment, transparency, size, etc.
• Offers 50+ free menu templates and image library resources .
• Any HTML code can be used within the JavaScript menu item.

DHTML menu templates

Sothink Tree Menu offers excellent menu templates by usage, and one customized type in the template gallery. You can start web menu from template; create a blank menu and apply a template to it later; and create new templates and modify the existing ones.

How to make tree menus ?

Step 1: Create DHTML tree menus from built-in templates

Launch Sothink Tree Menu, “Startup” window opens, you can start menu from built-in templates or new blank. First, click the name from built-in templates to select the menu; and then, preview menu style in preview window of Startup; last, click “OK” to start menu creation.

Step 2: Edit nodes and replace the contents

Add or remove nodes for DHTML tree menus. The added nodes will auto-inherit the node’s properties. Replace the text and set the link for each menu item.

Step 3: Publish menu to website

Menu creation is finished. Click the button “Publish” to publish DHTML menu. After the option is check, you can follow the step to publish your navigation to website. And upload all the resources.

The web designers usually apply “Cool” JS menu to navigate the website. This JS menu has the features of dynamic and interactive, which attracts the more traffic. Although JS menu is a stunning navigation menu, it is not friendly for search engine. How to make JS menu SE friendly to Google spider? Search Engine Friendly Code Maker included in Sothink DHTML Menu will help you to generate special code to make your JS menu crawled quickly by SE spider.

How to use Search Engine Friendly Code Maker?

When you finish JS menu configuration, click “Tools > Search Engine Friendly Coder Maker” or click on the toolbar to open Search Engine Friendly Coder Maker Dialog. The generated codes are listed within the dialog. You can click the button “Copy All” to copy these codes and then paste them into the page through web editor. These codes should be placed behind the menu code within BODY tag.

The codes are like this after they are copied to the web page:

The JS menu codes are marked by green.
The generated codes by search engine friendly code maker are marked by red.

<body>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
stm_bm([“menu0e98″,800,””,”blank.gif”,0,””,””,0,0,250,0,1000,1,0,0,””,””,0,0,1,2,”default”,
“hand”,””],this);
stm_bp(“p0″,[0,4,0,0,2,3,0,7,100,””,-2,””,-2,50,0,0,”#999999″,”#E6EFF9″,””,3,1,1,”#000000″]);
stm_ai(“p0i0″,[0,”Menu Item 1″,””,””,-1,-1,0,””,”_self”,””,””,””,””,0,0,0,””,””,0,0,0,0,1,”#E6EFF9″,0,”#FFD602″,0,””,””,3,3,1,1,
“#E6EFF9″,”#000000″,”#000000″,”#000000″,”8pt Verdana”,”8pt Verdana”,0,0]);
stm_aix(“p0i1″,”p0i0″,[0,”Menu Item 2”]);
stm_aix(“p0i2″,”p0i0″,[0,”Menu Item 3″,””,””,-1,-1,0,””,”_self”,””,””,””,””,0,0,0,”arrow_r.gif”,”arrow_r.gif”,7,7]);
stm_bpx(“p1″,”p0”,[1,4,0,0,2,3,0,0]);
stm_aix(“p1i0″,”p0i0”,[]);
stm_aix(“p1i1″,”p0i1”,[]);
stm_aix(“p1i2″,”p0i0″,[0,”Menu Item 3”]);
stm_ep();
stm_aix(“p0i3″,”p0i0″,[0,”Menu Item 4”]);
stm_aix(“p0i4″,”p0i0″,[0,”Menu Item 5”]);
stm_ep();
stm_em();
//–>
</script>
<noscript>
<ul>
<li>Unspecified</li>
<li><a title=”/index.htm” href=”/index.htm” target=”_self”> Home</a>|</li>
<li><a title=”/product.htm” href=”/product.htm” target=”_self”> Products </a></li>
<li> Showcase </li>
</ul>
</noscript>
</body>

Now, the remarkable JS menu is shown on your website; and SE friendly menu code is available to make your website indexed and crawled quickly by spider.

I believe the navigation of a website should always be simple. However, if a website has many pages and sub pages, the thought of navigation simplicity goes out the window. This is where drop down menus come into play. A good and well executed drop down menu can make navigating a large site easy for the user. While drop downs make site navigation easy, sometimes they can seem difficult to implement, but the solutions listed below are all a breeze to set up, especially since most of them are built on jQuery or MooTools.

Superfish

jQuery SuckerFish Style

Smooth Navigational Menu

Animated Drop Down Menu with jQuery

droppy

Simple Drop Down Menu for jQuery

UvumiTools Dropdown Menu

MooTools Drop Down Menu

MenuMatic

Drop-Down Menu with jQuery

Simple CSS vertical menu Digg-like

Drop Down Tabs

JavaScript Dropdown Menu with Multi Levels

jQuery Multi Level CSS Menu #1