Web Designer Blog

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:

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Sothink will proudly release a fresh new product soon — Sothink Flash Menu. This is an ultimate Flash menu builder; it not only creates Flash menus which inherit good performance from DHTML menus, but also endow the Flash drop down menus with diverse fascinating visual effects.

Take a quick look at parts of the cute Flash menus

Using Sothink Flash Menu, you can easily:

• Design the attractive Flash menus from rich resources.

The program provides 46 built-in templates, 50 amazing special menu effects, 35 preset styles and 4 categories of image library.

• Create SE friendly Flash drop down menu

Search Engine Friendly Code Maker, Google XML Sitemap and Sitemap generator can generate SE friendly code or XML file to make your Flash menu indexed by search engine spider quickly.

• Build functional menus for web navigation

Flash menu builder can build cross-browser menu, float menu, scroll menu, highlight menu, multi-column menu and non-English menu, etc.

• Import the various files to generate new Flash menu

Flash Menu supports XML/HTML/image as menu item, imports DHTML/tree menu to generate new menu.

• Customize menu style to perfect Flash menu

Make horizontal or vertical menu of unlimited levels, add sound, auto-adjust item size, auto-calculate menu size, embed font in Flash menu, set font, color, icon, transparent…

• Design Flash menus in WYSWYG interface

The program offers variable layout, preview window, publish wizard and ruler.

Good news for you, ask for discount coupon:

After viewing Flash menu samples and getting brief introduction about Sothink Flash menu, if you feel interested in this Flash menu builder; please email us at support@sothink.com with the title of “Flash Menu Release Notification Request”. When the product gets released, we will email you a notification together with a $10 discount coupon.

We collect some creative drop down menus for web navigation. Thanks to web designers, they give us more inspiration to create drop down menus and provides new ideas to design navigation bars. Let’s enjoy them:

Adobe is a well-known computer software company, it has historically focused upon the creation of multimedia and creativity software products. Though Adobe Systems Incorporated develops so many excellent software, services, resources, etc, you will find everything quickly with the help of Adobe menu, and won’t get lost on their website. How does Adobe menu navigation website effectively? Let’s take a look of snapshot from Adobe website:

Adobe Menu – Features:

In this Adobe menu, menu background and website background are the same, which makes you feel harmonious. At the first sight, just plain text links are on website, but you will see so many menu items after the mouse is over on the top adobe menu; in popup menu items, some items are classified into several categories by Bold and big-size font; the item with link guides the visitors to right web page with one click.

Popup menu is widely used for web navigation, it can popup its sub-menu upon user interactions, such as moving the mouse over the menu item, or clicking the menu item to display more link items. Popup menu is designed as the hierarchy style; you will see only the top-level menu item on website if no mouse behavior involved.

The popup menu is like this:

Popup menu has the features of slim body and large volume. You can add unlimited sub menu items under the top menu. The popup menu is specially applied to the website design of compact structure and multifarious contents. It not only classifies the web pages clearly for website, but also switches to the destination page in one click. Popup menu can be vertical or horizontal style, which is pretty good decoration element for website design.

At present, many well-known companies use popup menu as navigation bar to navigate their website, such as Microsoft, Adobe, Amazon, etc. But, how can I create popup menu of my own? Be patient, I will show you the steps to create popup menu with Sothink DHTML Menu.

Sothink DHTML Menu enables you to create popup menu for compact website. With the built-in templates and rich preset styles, you can create SE friendly popup menu in clicks. Fully customize popup menu to match with web design. Freely integrate with web editors to build popup menus.

Download Sothink DHTML Menu >>

Follow me to start a popup menu now:

1. Start Popup Menu with Built-in Templates

Launch Sothink DHTML Menu. Template windows open and you can choose popup menu “Simple > Classic Silver”.

2. Add the sub menu items for this popup menu

Select the menu item which needs add sub menu items below, and click the button “Append Sub Menu Item” in the menu panel to add sub menu items.

3. Modify the text and link for popup menu

Modify the text and link for your website. Click the text on menu panel, select the option “Menu Item > General”, and edit the text and link in property panel below.

4. Set resource folder to make popup menu work well in Intranet or Internet

Set resource folder to save JS and image files to the specific directory, which makes the popup menu display correctly. Enter the “Global > Resource Folder” to set them.

5. Publish popup menu and make it display on web page

Publish the resource files, menu code or JavaScript menu code to the specific folder; and insert two pieces of code to the tag “head” and “body” within web page.

Check the button “Publish” on the toolbar and choose the option “View/Copy Code…”; the dialog opens, follow the tips to copy and paste the codes to web page; and check the option “Copy the resource files” to copy resource to the defined folder.

Finish the above steps, you can preview menu locally; and upload all the resource files to web server to view popup menu on Internet.