CSS Navigation Bar

CSS Navigation Bar

Demo: Navigation Bars

Vertical

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Horizontal

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· Contact

· About

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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 needs 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 <li> elements makes perfect sense:

Example

<ul>
  <li><a href="default.asp">Home</a></li>
  <li><a href="news.asp">News</a></li>
  <li><a href="contact.asp">Contact</a></li>
  <li><a href="about.asp">About</a></li>
</ul>

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, which you will learn more about in the next chapters.

CSS Vertical Navigation Bar

Vertical Navigation Bar

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To build a vertical navigation bar, you can style the <a> elements inside the list, in addition to the code from the previous page:

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 width of <ul>, and remove the width of <a>, 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:

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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;
}