In creating a basic CSS menu with, for example, 5 entries, (Home, Contact us, Marketplace, News, Photography) --The words are of different lengths. When published, the words display across the screen at uniform lengths (varied somewhat by the controls in the CSS action, -but uniform in distance spacing none the less.
How can I close the gap between the longer and shorter words more aesthetically? Or in order to do this, must I make individual CSS Menus for each word, so I can place them with the distance needed for a more pleasing layout? If I make the spacing too short to close a wide gap between two short words, the longer menu words will sometimes to break into two lines when displayed – not what I want either…
It would be nice to have a single CSS menu for my menu items instead of several… but when they display (depending on the amount of menu items, the spacing needs more control…)
Right now you can’t without doing everything manually or doing what you call the “individual CSS Menu’s for each word.” Doing the individual way works to accomplish what you’re trying to do.
It’d be a great feature, but it isn’t available so far.
How can I close the gap between the longer and shorter words more aesthetically?
Comment from a beginner - doing my first ever site in Freeway and I’ve come across the same problem. Is it perhaps worth making a graphic of every menu item in order to guarantee equal sizes?
You could do that Frances, it’d take a bit longer to do. But by doing any graphic text you’re going to lose search-ability in that area since Google doesn’t read graphic text. Since list items are usually great assets to having good search-ability a better CSS menu option from Softpress would be ideal for it’s power users.
However like sugar, a graphic based menu would be acceptable within moderation.
I don’t know if you want a drop-down menu (which this example is not) but have a look at this example, it uses CSS and graphic buttons so it’s search-friendly plus you have more styling and layout options. <http://www.anoptic.com/demo/css_menu/index.html>
Todd
On Sep 17, 2008, at 1:20 PM, Dan J wrote:
You could do that Frances, it’d take a bit longer to do. But by doing any graphic text you’re going to lose search-ability in that area since Google doesn’t read graphic text. Since list items are usually great assets to having good search-ability a better CSS menu option from Softpress would be ideal for it’s power users.
However like sugar, a graphic based menu would be acceptable within moderation.
Thanks Todd, but I don’t see any drop downs happening on your sample page --and I guess it’s not what I was looking for, since that looks like what I can already do with the MenuBar Action applied to a table with rollover graphic inside.
CSS Menu seems to have the promise of a certain elegance and ease of use/management (to add/delete items to it easily) and looks great if displayed vertically where all the “buttons” can be the same width when published, – but in the horizontal mode where the button names might be of different lengths-- the whole thing falls apart.
I have 9 short word menu items I want to display in CSS across a 980px page header – and they’re all over the place. In Safari they look very close to the FW preview – but in FireFox, they completely run together like crap-- and I won’t even tell you what I see on a PC with IE.
So, unless a site has only a few words or so, I’m finding the CSS thing to be a stumbling block to the design cross-browsers-- which makes them essentially unusable if every browser displays them (horizontally) at different spacing – you can’t design a site that way.
Maybe I’m wrong here, but wysiwyg isn’t happening with CSS Menus as far as I can see… And I’d really like to use them and replace all my sites built with MenuBar graphics to the faster “better” method-- but I’m afraid to even try.
The CSS Menu action is limited. The only way to do what you describe is to manually set up CSS styles. However, it is possible to start with the CSS Menu action and add manually created CSS style to it as well to achieve what you want.
The only way to truly control all aspects of a CSS styled menu is to manually set them up from the Styles Editor.
Ok I’ll sift through the material – but what I see on the site is that his own menus are stacked vertically-- which presents no issues to the design---- I was referring to the menu categories displaying horizontally across the page. The only way I can make that work design-wise and put the words where I want them is to make individual CSS menus for each word-- which kind of defeats the purpose of the single CSS menu for all the items.
But let me read/digest this and see if the answer is there… and I just haven’t discovered it yet…thanks for the fast reply
