People often don’t do things for free. People usually don’t often go out of their way for complete strangers without compensation. People must get paid for what they do, generosity is seemingly limited in this day and age. Understandable. We’ve all gotta make a living, right?
I am a huge fan of the clean design of Brock Martin’s Infinet Design Blogs, it simply wasn’t in the cards for me just yet. Having some programming and interactive design knowledge enabled me to get my fingers dirty with WordPress and customize it to my needs – all except the hierarchical navigation and the ability to make a “sticky” section up top, so no matter where you are in my blog; you know where you are.
WordPress does not come with dropdown (hierarchical) menus. This surprised me. Dropdown menus have been used on the web for YEARS, but when it comes to blogs, for some reason, they are not integrated by default or even an option to turn on. To me, they’re some of the best navigational elements one can find on the internet to guide users around a website, and all of my years working in the interactive design & development industry, have yielded some of the best results.
Clean web design, from Kenneth Cole to the The Brokers Group – this type of navigation has been around for quite some time for companies large and small. Hierarchical menu systems have not been built into out-of-the-box solutions for blogging software – at least, none that I am aware of and it absolutely should be!
It just makes SENSE to have them, people! Organizationally, if most blogs were set up like this, in my opinion, the confusion would be at a minimum. There are quite a few people out there that are confused by blog layouts and the whole concept of blogging in general – sometimes I get confused when Fox 5 News tells me to “blog us” with our opinion of their question of the evening – the terminology gets tossed around in so many ways.
Anyway, getting back to the original point, I had been searching for WordPress Blog Plugins and had somehow stumbled upon Webdezine Pure CSS Horizontal Menu, a plugin for WordPress which achieved *almost* exactly what I was looking for.
Sheri, the creator of the Webdezine Pure CSS Horizontal Menu and owner of The Tenterhooks Blog and was kind enough to first work through any issues I had for weeks on end and then go above and beyond and customize this menu for me. I am PRAYING that through this experience she will catch the programming bug and will come up with an idea for extending the plugin to have the customized features that I have asked for so that others may benefit! I cannot thank her enough and please, please please take a look at her plugins for WordPress and her blog!
Sheri ROCKS. Sheri is the BOMB.
Thank you Sheri, much appreciated for all of your hard work in helping me customize this for a clean look.
by laura bruen
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