The boys over at Smashing Magazine are doing a stand up job providing web developers with quality content. In this articles they are doing a little research on the trends of website navigation found in many of todays popular websites. Like us here at CSS Menu Maker, they believe navigation is the key for a website to be successful. Any menu that i presented to the visitor of your site must be simple and intuitive. To many times users get caught up trying to figure out how to navigate a site and end up leaving all together. Head on over and take a look at some of the examples they have.

The first in a series of dropdown menus that use png shadows to give a 3D effect to the top level hovers and sub menus.

This one is a very basic concept that uses fixed width top level links and fixed size sub levels. This has made it easier to cope with IE6 and its lack of support for png transparency.

In this example IE6 has its own special style for the background images which enables it to correctly display the alpha image transparency.

Well the judging process has come to an end and to say it was a tough decision is and understatement. We received many quality submissions which made the judging process very difficult. But in the end we chose a menu that stood above the rest in both design and coding.

Congratulations to Bognar Andras of kreative-labs.com who is our CSS Menu Maker iPhone Contest winner. Bognar submitted a superb Drop-Down Menu that excelled in both design and and use of CSS. Check out his menu design HERE.

Thanks to all the contestants that participated in the iPhone contest and once again congratulations to Bognar Andras.

Well the contest has come to an end and to say it was a success is and understatement. We received over 80 high quality menu submissions from designers all over the world. We have begun the judging process with the help of the designer behind bitbox.com and are weeding through all the menus. As we judge them we will be adding them to the site so you can see the menus that where submitted. We will be deciding on a winner here in the very near future so check back for updates.

Yup, you heard right, we are giving away one of those sexy looking iPhones. In order to increase participation and build our library of menus we are giving away a brand new 4GB iPhone to the contestant that submits the most innovative, eye pleasing, and all around best looking CSS Menu.

We will be accepting horizontal, vertical, and drop-down menus as submissions. All menus must be 100% valid CSS (No JavaScript) and be cross-browser compliant. Each submission must consist of a Zip/Rar file containing the following:

- CSS Style Sheet.

- XHTML named “index.html” file with a working example of your menu.

- Include your contact information as a comment in the index.html file.

- All images in a folder named “images”. (If your menu uses images)

We will be accepting submission until 10/17/2007. After that we will begin the judging process with the help of the very talented designer behind bittbox.com. Check out his site at BittBox.com, it’s good stuff. The winner will be contacted by 10/30/2007 and receive a brand new 4GB iPhone. There is no limit to the number of menus you can submit so feel free send in multiple designs. Please send your submissions as an attachment to contest@cssmenumaker.com.

Recently I have been having a lot of trouble positioning and styling my CSS menu. The hard part isn’t getting your menu to look good in a browser; it’s getting your CSS menu to display correctly in all browsers. I can’t even count the number of times I would pat myself on the back after testing my website menus in Firefox only to open up IE6 and have my menu mutilated by Internet Explorers horrendous support of CSS standards.

I am a firm believer that no matter how good of a web developer you think you are there is always going to be some cross browser bug that eats up your precious time and patients. One technique I have used to save me much time when building sites it to use example CSS code for menus and then just replace the image files. I have found this method extremely useful in the past and I think to it also has helped me recognize CSS menu bugs ahead of time.

I understand though that many web developers do not have the skill to tweak and edit the HTML and CSS of their menus. This is why I have created the CSS Menu Generator. It takes the code out of the website building equation and allows you to concentrate solely on the content of the website menus. Try out our CSS Menu Generator software.

If you’re reading this I am assuming that you are a web developer of some sorts. I am also assuming that you are, or at one time where, a novice web developer trying to learn HTML and CSS. This site originally started out a project that I could learn PHP on, but I figured if I was going to put time into something I might as well make something useful not only for me but for everyone in the web development community.

When I first started to learn HTML and CSS one of the most frustrating things for me was getting my menus to display correctly. Naturally I figured I must not have been the only one ready to pull my hair out when my menu wouldn’t align correctly or my background image wasn’t showing up.

CSSMenuMaker.com provides quality, cross-browser compliant, fully CSS menus that you can customize and tweak to your heart’s content. If you have and suggestion for the site please visit the contact section and let me know what you think.