Thesis Theme: Creating a CSS Horizontal Drop Down Menu
Thesis Theme: Creating a CSS Horizontal Drop Down Menu
What exactly is a CSS Horizontal Drop Down Menu?
One of the first steps to developing a seo friendly web design is to organize for the navigation of your web site. Not only does an optimized navigation system pacify search engines, it also makes your first priority, your site visitors, have a much better experience on your site. Personally, nothing is more tiresome than to get trapped in a web site that has a poorly enhanced structure for navigation.
To most webmasters, the phrase CSS horizontal drop down menu is self explanatory. But, for those whom are a bit less experienced, it is fundamentally a horizontal drop down menu created through CSS code, rather than hard-coding it into your html, or using a scripting language, such as JavaScript. The drop down menu part refers to the way a sub-menu item "drops down" from its parent menu item. This not simply gives your site a clean, professional look, a drop down menu can help save you lots of web page real estate.
The first thing you absolutely must do is plan your page hierarchy. For example, if you have a site that sells jewelry, you might want to split your pages into Men's and Women's jewelry. When you select Jewelry from your horizontal drop down menu, you will see two (or possibly more) sub-menu items, namely, Men's and Women's. Selecting the Men's tab will make the menu drop down to show only Men's items, such as cuff links, tie clasps, men's watches and men's rings. Your site visitors will be able to very easily navigate through the menu drop down hierarchy, and you will have an orderly navigation system.
So, how do you accomplish this structure? Well, with Thesis, it is really a piece of cake. Thesis comes with css horizontal drop down menu functionality already in place. The most difficult thing you have to do is construct the pages you wish to be found in your drop down menu. Of course, since Thesis theme runs on the Wordpress platform, creating pages for your css horizontal drop down menu really couldn't be more effortless. The page editor has configuration options to choose the parent for the page you are working on. So, with the Men's Jewelry page, for example, you would just assign the parent page to be the Jewelry page. For Men's Watches, just set the parent to be Men's Jewelry. Then your horizontal drop down css menu will display Men's Watches as a selection choice when you click on the Men's Jewelry menu tab.
The pages you create don't automatically appear in your drop down menu. Now you have to go to the Thesis theme Site Options area and under the Navigation Menu section, open the Pages tab. There you will be able to see all the pages on your site. To add these pages to your css horizontal drop down menu, simply check the pages you want to show. Now hit the big green save button and you're all through. Well, at least you thought you were through.
After looking at your site you establish that, yes, the css horizontal drop down menu works very well, however you don't actually care for the default order of the sub menu tabs. Under the Women's Jewelry tab, you wanted earrings to come before bracelets. Normally, Wordpress takes care of this by enabling you set an index order to the pages you make , and is set to zero by default. The lower the index, the higher in the menu structure that specific page will display. This can be tiresome if you have dozens of pages for your drop down menu and eventually create a page you want in front of the rest. You would have to go from page to page and alter the order attribute. Thesis does away with this predicament all together.
The pages section under the Navigation Menu area of Thesis Site Options, as mentioned before, lists every page on your site, even those, for one reason or another, you chose to be private and invisible to your visitors. The ones that are "checked" will show up in your drop down menu, and the ones that are "unchecked", wont. The real elegance of this section in Thesis is that you can customize what displays on your css horizontal drop down menu simply by typing in what you want to display. Well, that's great, but it doesn't solve your order problem. Well, all you have to do is grab the page with your mouse and place it anywhere you want. Couldn't be simpler. Grab your earrings page and move it anywhere above your bracelets page and hit the Big Green Save Button. Your css horizontal drop down menu now displays your pages in the desired order.
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