CSS Navigation Bar
Navigation Bars
Having easy-to-use navigation
is important for any web site.
With CSS you can transform boring HTML menus into
good-looking navigation bars./
Navigation Bar
= List of Links
A navigation bar uses standard HTML as a base.
In our examples we will build
the navigation bar from a
standard HTML list.
A navigation bar is basically a list of links, so using the ul> and elements makes perfect sense:
Example
Now let's remove the bullets and the margins and padding from the list:
Example
ul ｛
list-style-type: none;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
Example explained:
list-style-type: none; -
Removes the bullets. A
navigation bar does not need
list markers
Set margin: 0; and padding: 0;
to remove browser default
settings
The code in the example above
is the standard code used in
both vertical, and horizontal
navigation bars.
Vertical Navigation Bar
To build a vertical navigation
bar, you can style the
elements inside the list,
in addition to the code above:
Example
li a ｛
display: block;
width: 60px;
}
Example explained:
display: block; - Displaying
the links as block elements
makes the whole link area
clickable (not just the text),
and it allows us to specify the width (and padding,
margin, height, etc. if you want)
width: 60px; - Block elements
take up the full width available by default.
We want to specify a 60 pixels width
You can also set the wisdth of, and remove the width of , as they will take up the full
width available when displayed as block elements.
This will produce the same result as our previous example:
Example
ul ｛
list-style-type: none;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
width: 60px;
}
li a ｛
display: block;
}
Vertical Navigation Bar Examples
Create a basic vertical
navigation bar with a gray
background color and change the
background color of the links when the user moves the mouse over them:
Example
ul ｛
list-style-type: none;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
width: 200px;
background-color: #f1f1f1;
}
li a ｛
display: block;
color: #000;
padding: 8px 16px;
text-decoration: none;
}
/﹡ Change the link color on
hover ﹡/
li a:hover ｛
background-color: #555;
color: white;
}