Horizontal with dropdown navigation... possible?

[AndyD]

HI All,
I am looking for a quick way to build accessible, standards compliant navigation systems and wondered if anyone had used Webstyle for this purpose. I downloaded the trial of MenuMaker but it seems to require JavaScript to be on to get anything at all showing, I think. Ideally I was looking for something that would generate a ul/li structure to a navigation menu.

Looking forward to your comments and advice

Andy

[suunto]

think someone mentioned this site http://www.likno.com/ in some of the discussions about menus, any good ?

[jyoung]

I use the likno product, AllWebMenus Pro. It's pretty good and not a bad price (and no I don't work for them). It too is a Javascript / DHTML product. I didn't have any W3C compliance problems with the site I did using this software but obviously Javascript needs to be enabled. Positioning the menu on the site using CSS takes some practice to get used to but they do provide some decent help files. Also works with a variety of HTML editors. It also can create site maps for you that Google will accept that are just plain old HTML.

I have used the menu maker in Webstyle too which seems to work OK for most needs. Haven't tried to see if they are compliant or not. Probably are.

There are also Flash menu makers but you usually need to be able to tweak them to be compliant.

Also, you should note that search engines don't really like either the javascript or flash. That doesn't mean not to use them, but you should always include a plain old HTML set of links to all your pages too. These are picked up by the search engines. I usually just put these across the bottom of the page.

Hope this helps a little.

Joe

[AndyD]

Thanks for the info Joe. I was considering likno too.... just a bit undecided at the moment. You mention difficulty positioning the menu with css, what specifically were the issues you encountered?

Cheers
Andy

[jyoung]

Hi Andy. In the program when you create a menu there is a "positioning" button you press. Then you choose how you want the menu positioned - upper left corner, upper right corner, middle of page, etc.. You can then do offsets for X and Y coordinates. It is not an "issue" but more of a learning curve thing for me. I had to do some trial and error, but I got it to work. But they do provide some good documentation for it.

Joe