Deigning A Simple HTML and CSS Menu Bar
Deigning A Simple HTML and CSS Menu Bar
Labels: CSS, HTML, Web
In this post I’m going to show how you can create a menu-bar (list of hyperlinks) using CSS styling. This
requires that you at least have some basic knowledge of HTML and preferably CSS too. If you can’t figure
out what a menu-bar looks like, scroll to the bottom.
Seen! Though pretty much the same can be implemented using tables but that is not web developers
prefer.
In HTML there is not standard tag for creating a menu like item therefore we would be customized or style
a standard tag. We’ll be using the ‘unordered list’ <ul></li> tag to do so, in this case every item
i.e. <li></li> will be items in the menu.
<ul>
<li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2</li>
</ul>
Item 1
Item 2
Obviously this is not what we want; items here are displaying Bullets and are one below the other while
we want them to be in one line, one after the other. To achieve this we’ll style his ‘unordered list’ by
defining a CSS class, then applying it to this tag.
<head>
<style>
.menu ul
{
list-style: none;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="menu">
<ul>
<li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2</li>
</ul>
</div>
</body>
Item 1
Item 2
Great! And by the way if you don’t know what a CSS class is, for now you can think of it as a way of
defining properties in CSS which could be used in HTML to classify different parts or tags to have
properties as defined. You can see in the above code we have used <div class="menu"></div> to
classify that portion and all the tags between it to have the special property defined in CSS.
Coming to the menu bar, it still has a big problem that it doesn’t look like a Menu. Well the same list would
look like a menu if we style it, for this we would have to define display: inline for the <li> tag of the
unordered list. This would make the items in the list to be in ONE line hence look like a Menu.
<head>
<style>
.menu ul
{
list-style: none;
}
/*We want the <li> (items) to be inline*/
.menu ul li
{
display: inline;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="menu">
<ul>
<li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2</li>
<li>Item 3</li>
<li>Item 4</li>
</ul>
</div>
</body>
Item 1
Item 2
Item 3
Item 4
Ok now our menu bar is almost done, now we just have to make it more attractive and to react to mouse
activity. For this we’ll add some more code to the CSS (style sheet):
Added stuff is self explanatory, padding is used to increase the clickable are of the menu items. Now the
Menu Bar would look like:
Item 1
Item 2
Item 3
Item 4
NOTE: Hover effect is not working here, because Icannot add stylesheet for seperate pages in Blogger
and I don't want to mess up the CSS Validity of this page.
<html>
<head>
<style>
.menu ul
{
list-style: none;
}
.menu ul li
{
display: inline;
}
.menu ul li a
{
/*Increase Clickable Area*/
padding: 8px;
padding-left: 15px;
padding-right: 15px;
color: #000;
background: #ccc;
}
/*On Mouse Over the Link*/
.menu ul li a:hover
{
color: #fff;
background: #000;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="menu">
<ul>
</ul>
</div>
</body>
</html>