Expanding Menu

[penmore]

Thought I would share this expanding menu with you all. I haven't put every link in but I have put an anchors at the bottom and top of the page.

Cheers,
Pete

[Acorn]

Thought I would share this expanding menu with you all. I haven't put every link in but I have put an anchors at the bottom and top of the page.
Cheers, Pete

Pete, thank you for sharing.
I have a few issues with your approach.

It is not safe to put a white full stop on a page to act as your top of page anchor. I changed the Page Background from white and it stood out.
A safer approach is to create an object with Placeholder code that has an id of "topofpage".

Similarly, the white rectangle to get a shadow effect equally fails. It also had no rounded corners.
Feather a grey box instead.
The next problem is the shadow does not grow when the sub-menu items reveals.

You have not lined up Item2 when Items 2a & 2b are revealed.

The appearance of menu items is Instant - far to abrupt for most especially when the whole menu disappears when you move the mouse off a lower Item.

You have no rollover effect on entering any of the Items.

All menu Items should have some link of some sort to should the pointy hand. Vital for screen readers, otherwise a visually impaired person will have no indication.

The "back" text line seems to be an orphan. It does nothing.

Grouping text with a box creates a graphic.
Give each blue box a Name of filename="blueBox" and orange box "orangeBox". That way, you only produce two very simple graphics so the payload is smaller, making downloads faster.

For a menu to work you have to demonstrate it across many pages. Only then would the "Back to menu button" make sense.
Use "Top" instead and have hover text tell you what it is there for.

Personally, I would use a pure CSS menu approach as its maintenance is far less.

Happy designing,
Acorn

[penmore]

Pete, thank you for sharing.
I have a few issues with your approach.

It is not safe to put a white full stop on a page to act as your top of page anchor. I changed the Page Background from white and it stood out.
A safer approach is to create an object with Placeholder code that has an id of "topofpage".

Similarly, the white rectangle to get a shadow effect equally fails. It also had no rounded corners.
Feather a grey box instead.
The next problem is the shadow does not grow when the sub-menu items reveals.

You have not lined up Item2 when Items 2a & 2b are revealed.

The appearance of menu items is Instant - far to abrupt for most especially when the whole menu disappears when you move the mouse off a lower Item.

You have no rollover effect on entering any of the Items.

All menu Items should have some link of some sort to should the pointy hand. Vital for screen readers, otherwise a visually impaired person will have no indication.

The "back" text line seems to be an orphan. It does nothing.

Grouping text with a box creates a graphic.
Give each blue box a Name of filename="blueBox" and orange box "orangeBox". That way, you only produce two very simple graphics so the payload is smaller, making downloads faster.

For a menu to work you have to demonstrate it across many pages. Only then would the "Back to menu button" make sense.
Use "Top" instead and have hover text tell you what it is there for.

Personally, I would use a pure CSS menu approach as its maintenance is far less.

Happy designing,
Acorn

I wasn't looking for a critique rather just posting an idea on how to do it in web designer.

I don't believe your response to my post will do anything to encourage newer members to share their ideas and that isn't good.

Whilst I agree with your comment about CSS and believe in the use of HTML, CSS & Javascript, most members responding to threads
are continually saying that members don't have experience with HTML, CSS & Javascript, that's why I constructed it that way.

I have lots of other ideas to post and hope they won't be met with a similiar response.
Thanks,
Pete

[Acorn]

I wasn't looking for a critique rather just posting an idea on how to do it in web designer.

I don't believe your response to my post will do anything to encourage newer members to share their ideas and that isn't good.

Whilst I agree with your comment about CSS and believe in the use of HTML, CSS & Javascript, most members responding to threads
are continually saying that members don't have experience with HTML, CSS & Javascript, that's why I constructed it that way.

I have lots of other ideas to post and hope they won't be met with a similiar response.
Thanks,
Pete

Pete, your approach is problematic so I offered suggestions for you to improve and so others can develop your idea.
Building menus is hard but can be done totally in Xara with Layers and rollovers.

Newcomers typically appreciate constructive criticism and I offered suggestions, from my experience, to make your design be better and work.

If I had posted an idea, I would have hated no one replying or saying it was no good, without explaining.
Yes, I could have posed a number of questions but there were too many.
I won't bother you again.

Acorn