Need to create all kind of great web site navigation menus? Cascading Drop down Menus, Mega Menus, Popup or Context Menus. Menus that have great display animations, are CSS based and fully cross browser compatible, which makes them search engine friendly?
Table of Content:
- The database
- Connecting to the database using Dreamweaver
- Creating a Recordset
- Displaying the links on the page
- Adding the link
- Repeating data
- Styling the Navigation
- Style the list items
- Creating a rollover effect on hover
- Summary
Dynamic Menus with ASP and CSS
Many database-driven web sites are run from some form of content management system, and so navigation menus need to be dynamically created – with the links being pulled from the database. Working in this way means that you may not know how many links will appear in a navigation menu when you design the site, as the number will depend on how many are stored in the database at any one time.
This tutorial explains how to create a menu from a list of links stored in an Access database, using the ASP Server Model and the Dreamweaver Server Behaviors, covering creating the database table, connecting to the database, creating a Recordset and using a Repeat Region to display the data. Once we have created the menu using ASP, we will then
use CSS to style it in an attractive and code efficient manner that will work well no matter how many links are displayed.
This tutorial is suitable for complete beginners in CSS and ASP, and is compatible with MX and MX2004 and above.
Rachel Andrew
Rachel Andrew is a trained dancer and singer, whose CV lists jobs as diverse as company choreographer for a physical theatre company to chargehand carpenter for “The Mousetrap” at St. Martin’s Theatre in London’s West End. After leaving the theatre when pregnant with her daughter, Rachel started to design sites mainly out of curiosity into how it worked. It didn’t take too long for her to figure out that her skills lay in development as opposed to design and these days she tends to leave the design to designers so she can concentrate on writing code, dismantling computers and installing Linux on anything that stays still long enough.
Rachel has worked in the industry as a webmaster, technical project manager and senior web developer but in September 2001 set up her own company ‘edgeofmyseat.com’, which provides complete web solutions and outsourced development services for design agencies and Internet start-ups who do not have in-house web developers.
As well as managing and doing much of the development on projects for edgofmyseat.com Rachel is a published author and worked as a co-author on the following titles for Glasshaus:
Dynamic Dreamweaver MX ISBN:1904151108
Fundmental Web Design and development Skills: ISBN:1904151175
Dreamweaver MX Design Projects: ISBN:1904151272
Rachel is also a member of the Web Standards Project serving on The Dreamweaver Task Force.
In her spare time Rachel studies for ‘fun’ with the Open University, does family and local history research and spends time with her 5 year old daughter and her other half, Drew McLellan.