CSS Mega Menu Examples

Pure CSS Mega Drop Down Menu

The amount of content displayed on today’s popular websites and online news sources is staggering. Web design experts have been struggling to find the best ways of organizing all those articles, pages and posts in a way that would not make the site seem overcrowded and bloated. Starting pages pose the biggest problem, because they have to reflect the overall concept of the site without turning off visitors with walls of text or a rainbow of colorful pictures that seem to jump out from the screen. Fortunately, the problem is about to be solved by CSS mega menus.

The best way of dealing with this issue is to only fill website front pages with the most relevant information and content, leaving the rest of the site to be represented by links in its navigation menu. With the limitations of HTML and CSS capabilities being common knowledge, this approach has worked well in the past.

However, with the advent of spectacular Web 2.0 interfaces designed by multinational companies, Internet users no longer take kindly of incomplete front-page experience and webmasters are forced to reconsider their way of dealing with the matter to avoid losing visitors.

Mega drop down menus, made available through more advanced capabilities of CSS and CSS3, are nearly screen-size pages that remain hidden from the eyes of a site visitor until a mouse hover event is detected on a particular area. This function is similar to creating a sub-menu for navigation bars, only in this the sub-menu offers not only links to the pages with relevant content, but the content itself, complete with text, pictures and everything else by virtue of being absolutely huge! That is the reason why this type of multi-column sub-menu is referred to as a mega menu.

CSS3 mega menus have become especially popular among sites that deal with online news publications or commerce, allowing visitors to quickly get an impression of the site’s content without actually browsing it. Naturally, this increases the chances of a product or news story to catch someone’s attention and prompt further interest, possibly resulting in monetary gain for the website.

A good mega menu example is the page preview feature of Google search results. Although not generated by hovering over the site’s navigation bar, it displays content behind the destination link without having to follow through. It increases the likelihood of an Internet user to be introduced to the content and saves time, which is essential in the modern online environment.

The best thing about creating transitions in CSS3 is that they will still work when accessed from an older browser that does not support the latest version of CSS. It will disable a couple of extra features in the process, but will not hurt your site’s visitors. Extra features and smooth transitions will make your website look polished and professional, but before switching to CSS3, consider your options.

Now is the best time for webmasters to apply this effective feature to their own sites. Although every CSS3 mega menu bears some likeness to an actual website page, only slightly smaller, it takes practice to get it right. While proceeding by manual use of CSS code can create good results, sometimes the better choice is to make use of the different types of CSS mega menu templates found online or turn to help of professional website development software. In some cases, simply using a web menu building application like CSS3 Menu will be enough.

See also:
CSS3 Rounded Corners, CSS3 Shadow, CSS3 Animation, CSS3 Text Shadow, CSS3 Gradient, CSS3 Transition

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