looking for best horizontal web menu & why would you use images?

Question

i am looking for good looking horizontal menu for my web page. I keep looking at other sites and i noticed that a lot of them use images for the menu. This seems like a real pain to maintain (a separate image for each menu item). Why would anyone bother with this approach? is it just to get certain fonts that might not be on the machine.

the issue is when i search for regular text based ones, they all look like they belong on a webpage built by a 10 year old in 1995. Is there anyway to have a really good looking horizontal menu without using images?

Answer 1

Try this -

http://www.opencube.com/index.asp

They have a paid version as well as a free version. I think it depends on how you use it.

Answer 2

There's thousands, many of them created by Stu Nicholls, of CSS Play. Some of them are a little too cutting edge, but there's some fantastic stuff in there.

As an aside, images are, or were, often used to create the various Web 2.0^TM rounded corners, with gradient pastels and glossy-glass overlays. It's not a technique that I've ever supported, preferring to stick with well-realised text-based menu structures (the notorious <ul id="navigation"> and so forth).

One of the problems of image-based menus was that they didn't expand, or contract, properly if a user zoomed their display in, or out. Which led to the various Sliding Doors CSS, or the Custom Corners Problems, both approaches introducing many, many extra elements to achieve something that CSS can achieve more-or-less on its own now (with the notable exception of much of the IE family). It was a solution, but it was a solution that brought problems...

Answer 3

Search for "css horizontal menu" and you'll see many good looking horizontal menu's using CSS only. However, it's possible that designers have something specific in mind that requires a certain background, with certain fonts like you said, or a certain layout that takes a lot of effort to create in CSS opposed to just displaying the correct picture. In those cases using images might be a better option, and you can be sure that it looks exactly the same in any browser.

It's also possible to automatically generate the images using e.g. PHP's GD library. That way you can use a single base image and add whatever text that's needed, solving the maintainability issue when menu items change a lot, or you need texts in different languages, etc.

Answer 4

There are many CSS based menus available in the below link -

http://www.styledmenus.com/

The below contains a simple but elegant menu without using images -

http://www.styledmenus.com/2008/12/nozml-css-menu.html