Advice on drop down menus

[pulsewidth947]

I'm currently designing a Tech Support website for the College I work at. I'm trying to get a nice drop down menu nav thing going on, but I don't really know where to start.

If you look on iPodlounge (http://www.ipodlounge.com/), then hover over one of the links, thats kind of the effect i'm going for.

HOWEVER :), while I do want the sub-menu below the button like on iPodlounge, i want each link in the sub-menu to be listed horizontally, not vertically.

Anyone know a good resource for teaching this? I googled and it gave me this resource (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/horizdropdowns/) which i'm having difficulty tweaking. There was another website, but the resulting drop down didnt perform correctly in Safari, and Mac compatibility is crucial for me!

I could knock something together in Flash, but I want to stay clear of Flash navigation. I'd prefer something using CSS/Javascript like the above example.

I would appreciate any responses/advice, thanks!

[munkle]

Something like this (http://www.alistapart.com/d/horizdropdowns/horizontal.htm)?




Edit: Just re-read your post! :o But the tutorial uses CSS so it should be pretty easily customisable... There's also about 20 pages of comments which might turn up something useful! Sorry again about posting the same link!

Is the navbar at Macromedia (http://macromedia.com/) the type of thing you're looking for?

[pulsewidth947]

Thats exactly what I want.. something nice and clean that works on a range of browsers.. its a bit difficult searching for something when you dont know what your looking for!

btw thats a mint monkey in your avatar :D

[Lacero]

My advice: Don't do drop down menus. It's more work you're giving the visitors who have to fish for the menus. Just present it static on the page in an easy navigational format. Look at Apple for an example of excellent menus. Apple could have gone with drop down menus, but they didn't. Why?

[munkle]

Thats exactly what I want.. something nice and clean that works on a range of browsers.. its a bit difficult searching for something when you dont know what your looking for!

If you have Dreamweaver some of the templates have the same navbar so you can hack the code from there.

btw thats a mint monkey in your avatar :D

Thanks, he's from the London Zoo!

[pulsewidth947]

Thanks for your advice guys. Yeah apples site does look nice, but i dont like the whole "click a button, load a new page with all the old buttons" thing. i'm pretty anal about stuff like that :rolleyes:

man i gotta head down to london zoo to say hello to that monkey.. havent been there in years! monkeys never fail to make me laugh.. i like that orange monkeys hair..

[arf]

I have made use of this menu (http://ypslideoutmenus.sourceforge.net/) before. Works really well and works in every browser I can think of.

[pulsewidth947]

arf - nice link.. thanks! Is there a way to get the sub menu to be horizontal rather than vertical? Meaning I wanted the sub to appear below the main menu, but I wanted all the links within the sub to appear next to each other horizontally.

I scrapped the idea of using a horizontal menu now, redesigned the site a little. Time is of an essence - and I've got to work out PHP/SQL - specifically, how to generate an SQL database containing the usernames/passwords of everybody in the Staff group of our Xserve's Workgroup Manager.... could take anything up to a year as I've never even looked at either PHP/SQL before! It seems all the other IT techs here either know about the Xserve OR PHP/SQL... not very handy is it :rolleyes: