CSS3 Animation Menu

"Current Blue" CSS3 Menu with CSS3-only Animation (Slide effect)

CSS3 Animation when designing a navigation menu

Animation may not seem as important when designing a navigation menu, but at a time when constantly competing websites are trying their best to trump each other in their fight for more visitors, every extra feature matters. CSS3 offers a flexible approach to producing animated objects within a website and enhances the feel of any navigation bar.

Unlike web surfers in the past, modern Internet users have started expecting more interactivity on the websites they visit. They like to see even the simplest objects like links and buttons to respond to when their mouse cursor clicks or hover over them. It adds greatly to the overall experience on the website. Otherwise, the site starts to feel dead and old-fashioned. It is therefore necessary to employ links and buttons on navigation menus with advanced features like transitions and animation.

Previously achieved by using cumbersome and memory-straining external plugins like Silverlight and Adobe Flash, the ability to create animation with CSS3 has been made available by the latest version of it. The people behind its development resisted including animation in their code at first. They argued that it was not part of a website’s style, which is the only concern of CSS. Nevertheless, they did include it, and while the result still has room for improvement, it suits the needs of creating animated navigation menus perfectly.

CSS3 animation can be used as a way to notify Internet users of landing on particular button, by making it jump, for example. It can also create sliding or even rotating buttons, which will be a step further from conventional navigation bars seen on most websites.

CSS3 Menu offers these features to website owners and designers through its free software. The simple, intuitive and efficient interface of CSS3 Menu makes the development process easy and even enjoyable, focusing only on the animation features that you really need.

In case you are worried about your website visitors not being able to see the animated navigation menu you have produced for them, you will be glad to know that there is no reason for such concern. All elements of CSS3 are fully compatible with all popular browsers, including Opera, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Even if some Internet users have not upgraded their browsers to the latest version yet, they will quickly catch up, as video upload sites like YouTube are reengineering their services to work through the latest HTML5 standard, which includes CSS3 animation. Even social networking games are rumored to switch to HTML5 once its support of more advanced features becomes more stable.

Anyone who keeps an eye out for major developments on the web arena knows that whatever type of plugins or apps are employed by popular websites, they almost immediately find their way into the computers of the majority of Internet users.

Therefore, it is necessary to improve the level of interaction on your own websites and produce animation with CSS3 through services like CSS3 Menu. An animated navigation menu is not so much a fancy new feature, as it is something that will soon be expected of every site on the Internet, just as highlighting of active links is.