Can I have a navigation menu where the current page is highlighted somehow?

If I have a navigation menu bar with various buttons pointing to different pages, I can repeat that on all pages. But I would like the current page button to be different (different colour?) so it's obvious that there's no point in clicking it. Is that easy to do? It is in other web design s/w, but I can't see how to do it here.

Alan

By default, the MouseOver button state is also the button state for the current page.

BUT, this only applies to the top tier pages and does not apply to pages that occur in sub menus. It should. But it does not.

What you can do, is create a MouseOver button for these pages and paste the button over the current button for the page in the Page & Layer Gallery.

Another thing you can do, is create a new layer that is above the MouseOver layer and name this layer MouseDown. This third button can be unique and will serve as the current page button, but as stated previously, only on the top tier pages.

UPDATE - Never mind. I tried this with sub menus and it does not work. The only way this will work is to create your menu on layers instead of using the Nav Bar tool. One hopes that Xara will address the nav bar soon.

Ok - thanks.

Alan

Alan - Several years ago I put together a navigation system using layers to show how effective this can be. http://gwpriester.com/menu-test/ It takes a lot of time but the unique results are well worth the effort.

Each new layer can have its own MouseOver layer. But each time you add a new MouseOver layer you have to give it a unique name: MouseOver-1, MouseOver-2, etc.

Or a simple line. Just add a marker to whichever page is active.

This is my flavour of the month this month.
Attachment 124305

Nice solution Chris. BUT the problem is how to handle the sub menu pages.

Nice one, Chris. Might be a problem if you're working with subpages though, because then you'd be using Xara's navbar feature with the buttons 'lighting up' on the main pages. Unless, of course, you build the navbar yourself as Gary did.


Oops, cross-posting.

Here's a solution that is fairly straight forward. http://gwpriester.com/layer-menu/

I have attached a Web Designer file with explanation on the first page.

Basically, each navigation button is a separate soft group of a MouseOff and MouseOver state except the striped buttons that indicate the current page.

When you both said Sub Pages I thought, yeah, no problem. Then I read Xara Navbar...ok, problem, I've never used one before. So I did a reverse Veni, Viidi, Vici. I tried, I failed, I walked away.

Quote:

---

So I did a reverse Veni, Viidi, Vici. I tried, I failed, I walked away.

---

Heh heh. This is another area that needs revisiting.

Thanks all - some interesting ideas. I'll have a think about it.

Alan

Liked Gary P's solution at http://gwpriester.com/layer-menu/.

Curiosity got the better of me to explore how to get this whole sub-menu thing to work better using a standard Xara NavBar (attached).

For comparatives, I build a standard menu bar and used the Xara sub-menu on one of the buttons, then build a Single Button plus Navbar combo as a mix and match idea, then created a button-linked dropdown menu using a vertically oriented Xara NavBar on Sub-Menu & MouseOver Sub-Menu layers. Set the NavBar Sub-Menu to link to all pages in the website, then deleted the links to the pages that were not related to the specific button. This overcomes the problem that you cannot copy and paste a NavBar to different layers in the same website. Set button mouseover (through Web Animation) to link to the button-specific sub-menu layer.

What it did highlight (and this maybe just me) is that even when I created a button with centred-justified text, the Xara sub-menu button would only show this as left-justified. Could be my mistake, but I would have thought the sub-menu button should by default inherit the properties of the primary button? Seem to remember it did adopt left-centre-right justification in the past.

Gary

There are a multitude of opportunities for the Nav Bars and lack of supported fonts and lack for alignment are two. When this feature was introduced quite a few years ago, and members brought up some of these questions, the management at Xara dismissed the member concerns. I can only hope they will revisit these options and give us something that is professional in appearance and eliminates the need for these tedious work-arounds.

Good exploration of options, Gary. One thing that can help with the drop down menus is to increase the spacing and to add a separator between buttons. So the lines of type are not so closed up.