Steve’s Blog

Yesterday we talked about how to create a professional-looking tree menu using Extended Menu.

Today we have a quick tutorial on how to connect two copies of Extended Menu to make a menu thats twice as good. Well, maybe not that good, but will allow you to create a neat parent-child menu. You can see an example of this menu working on Ludhiana.net.in.

This way to doing this things has one major advantage and disadvantage compared to the more common child-parent setup that you can see on site such as AJC.com.

• Advantage: The child menu links area only appears if any are published. Otherwise the menu area will neatly hide.
  
• Disadvantage: This menu isn’t so dynamic. Users need to click through to see the children.
  

Continue reading “How to Make a 2 Level Menu with Extended Menu”

In today’s post we’ll show you how to get add a clean and SEO-friendly menu to your Joomla site. This tutorial was inspired by several recent site audits we’ve done that revealed serious problems with dropdowns menus.

Four Frequent Problems With Dropdown Menus

• Menu sprawl. People think that because they can have 100 menus links, they should. More menu links are counterproductive. They only confuse visitors.
• Visual sprawl. Dropdowns tend to hide items underneath and often conflict with other scripts/
• Bad SEO. This isn’t true for some dropdowns but if I often do SEO audits for large sites that only have 5 or 6 pages indexed. Why? They built a flashy Javascript or Flash dropdown menu.
• Unclear. When someone has clicked on a dropdown option, they need to hover over the menu to see them again.

Continue reading “How to Create a Vertical, Expanding Menu”