CSS Fixed Menu – Pinned-Down Style | raphael haefeli | portland, oregon freelance web design and development

CSS Fixed Menu – Pinned-Down Style

Posted on Wednesday, January 13, 2010 | 1 Comment | Leave a comment
Filed under CSS

CSS is such a simple, but powerful mechanism for adding style to websites which makes your design options infinite. One of the most common uses of CSS is to create nice looking and useful menus for websites. We can create all kinds of different styles for menus: Horizontal, vertical, with drop down boxes, etc.

Pinned-Down Style

There’s another technique that I found to be very interesting and pretty cool to apply to our menus. It’s called Pinned-Down Style. Our menu is going to be in a fixed position on the page and when the user scrolls up and down the menu will float over the page at the position we defined.

The XHTML Code:


...
<body>

<div class="banner">
    <p>
        <a href="#">Home</a>
        <a href="#">About Us</a>
        <a href="#">Our Activities</a>
        <a href="#">Contact Us</a>
        <a href="#/">Site Map</a>
        <a href="#">Privacy</a>
        <a href="#">Links</a>
        <a href="#">Our Partners</a>
        <a href="#">Articles</a>
    </p>
</div>
...

</body>

This is just a paragraph with links that we are going to style with CSS. We can see the final result after we apply the following CSS code:

The CSS Code:


div.banner {
	margin: 0;
	font-size: 100% /*adjust to make the menu larger or smaller*/;
	font-weight: bold;
	line-height: 1.1;
	text-align: center;
	position: fixed;
	top: 2em;
	left: auto;
	width: 8.5em;
	right: 2em;
}

div.banner p {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0.3em 0.4em;
	font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
	background: #990000;
	border: thin outset #000;
	color: white;
}

div.banner a, div.banner em { display: block; margin: 0 0.5em }
div.banner a, div.banner em { border-top: 2px groove #CCC }
div.banner a:first-child { border-top: none }
div.banner em { color: #CFC }

div.banner a:link { text-decoration: none; color: white }
div.banner a:visited { text-decoration: none; color: #CCC }
div.banner a:hover { background: black; color: white }

Summary

This is a good technique for a website that has a lot of content. It enables the user to access the menu quickly instead of having to scroll up the page to access the menu in order to navigate the site. What makes this work are the the 2 following rules: position: fixed; which causes the menu to be in a fixed position, and the display: block; that makes the a elements inside the menu to be displayed as block elements causing them to display one below the other. It would be a good idea to place the XHTML code for the menu at the top of all the content, right below the opening body tag for organization purposes. That’s it. Pretty simple. Play around with these settings and find the best design for your needs!