Web Designer Blog

A website is like a magazine where people search for information. The table of contents of a magazine is like the navigation of a website. Table of contents provides an overview of your magazine, while navigation also shows on what your viewers should expect to see on your website. Both serves as pathways for your viewers on how they can explore your website.

Whenever I think of what is the most important task a web designer could do, I always end up thinking that it should be the creation of good navigation. It must be well-designed in a user-friendly manner that the moment the viewer sees it, they instantly understand how it is used and what is it for. A navigation must also be creatively done, it is one of the elements you can find on a website where you can capture a viewer’s attention.

What’s kind of menus is good for web navigation?

The less click, the better.

Viewers tend to be impatient when searching for information; they want to seek what they are searching very quickly. Make sure that your navigation responds as quickly as possible to your viewers’ instincts.

Horizontal Navigation Menu

Horizontal navigation is the widely used navigation of web designers today. Usually, the navigation bar is placed right under the header.

Good Characteristics:
1. It occupies less space
Horizontal navigation is mostly used by web designers for it occupies less space, because it is placed at the top part of the website. Then, the rest of the spaces you can use for your content.

2. More noticeable
Our eyes first notice elements of the website that are placed on the center, that is why horizontal menus are more noticeable since they are placed on the top and center part of the website.

3. Easier to use
Viewers find horizontal navigation easier to use. Comparing it to vertical navigation, you still have to move your mouse pointer on the left part of the screen (or sometimes right) to click the menus. If the navigation is horizontally placed, you just have to move your pointer upward to click a menu button.

4. Viewers are already used to it
Since it is the mostly used navigation, viewers always expect that all websites have this type of navigation.

Bad Characteristics:

1. Limited space for your menus
When using horizontal navigation, you are limited on the width space of your website and this still depends on the layout of your website.

2. Can only be used if number of menus are already known
Horizontal navigation can only be used if the number of your menus is already fixed, because the size and design depends on the number of menus to be placed.

View Horizontal Navigation Menu Samples for Inspiration:

Horizontal navigation bar is one of the essential objects in website design. It occupies less space and groups the menus horizontally, and makes web navigation easier too. Also, it can customize to fit any kind of designs, from clean and classic to vivid and individual style. Here, I will show you 6 good looking horizontal navigation bar designs:

Read on »

Sothink DHTML Menu provides many well-designed black menus in built-in templates, which you can apply them directly. Let’s view these black menus:

Silver Black

Silver black menu will change into blue when the mouse is over on menu item.

Board

Black menu is on the top, and popup menu uses the irregular background image.

List

The menu contains multi-column list popup menus.

With Sothink DHTML Menu, you just edit background setting for menu item or popup menu. You can set the background as black, or insert the black image as background in panel below:

If you want to set black for each menu item, enter the “Menu Iitem > Background” property panel.

If you want to set black for popup menu or the 1-level menu, enter the “Popup Menu > Background” property panel.

Simple enough? Download Sothink DHTML Menu to experience this process and create black menu from the built-in templates.

Website color is vital component for web design. Many website designers are likely to choose black as main color from a marketing point of view. In order to get a certain harmony, the web elements usually apply the similar or the same color to match with web design, for example, black menu is used on the black website.

Black menu is color joker, it is widely used for the various website colors which ranges from light to dark, the classic color includes black&white, red&black; black menu conveys the sense of fashion, business, reliance; black menu is plain and high capacity to contain almost all URL links to reach the target page quickly. Black menu is absolutely the popular menu, let’s view the excellent black menus from the famous companies:

Adobe

Sony

Nero