dropdown - MOR10

Pure CSS Drop-Down Menu tutorial – a slight omission

I just got a comment from a reader of my recent Expression Newsletter article The No-Code Way to a Pure CSS Horizontal Drop-Down Menu with Expression Web. He was having trouble getting the grey boxes to “fill out” properly which left the menu looking weird.

A quick review of his CSS told me the problem was he didn’t have the display property set to block. A slight omission for sure but I was more focused on where it originated. A quick read of the paragraph in the article showed me that somewhere in the editing (probably during my rigorous clean-up) this small but important piece of code was ommitted. Which means if people follow the tutorial step by step they’ll run into the same problem.

I’ve already informed the newsletter team of the issue and hopefully they’ll fix it presently. In the meantime, if you’ve run into this problem and you found your way to this blog, here is the full paragraph and the resulting code:

5th paragraph under the heading “Style the links”:

To set the height of the link go to the Block category and set the line-height attribute to 30px to match the height of the ul li style you defined earlier. The reason you are using the line-height attribute instead of the height attribute is that line-height automatically places the text at vertical center. If you were to use height you would have to set the vertical placement manually using padding. To set the width, go to the Position category and set width to 150px to match. Finally, to “fill out” the area with the background colour, go to the Layout category and set display to block.

The resulting code should look like this:

ul li a {
	background-color: #808080;
	color: #FFFFFF;
	width: 142px;
	display: block;
	text-decoration: none;
	line-height: 30px;
	padding-left: 8px;
}

You can find a full working version of the menu here and it’s CSS here for reference.

Read my article in the Microsoft Expression November Newsletter

A month or so ago Microsoft contacted me and asked if I would write an article on Expression Web for their Expression Newsletter. How could I say no to such an opportunity? After some back and forth about the topic I landed on an article on how to create a Pure CSS Drop-Down menu. Over time I’ve encountered numerous solutions, most of which were clunky and didn’t work properly. So the tutorial demonstrates how to create a fully functional CSS-only drop-down menu utilizing the excellent CSS features in Expression Web.

That’s not to say you have to use Expression Web to get something out of the article though. You can follow the tutorial and get the same results even if you’re using Notepad to build your sites. It’s just that Expression Web makes it a hell of a lot easier to manage.

This article comes hot on the heels of my book Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Expression Web 2 in 24 Hours which contains an expanded tutorial on the same topic that also covers a layers-based drop-down menu. If you are an Expression Web 2 user of if you are considering buying or switching over to this excellent web authoring and publishing platform I humbly suggest you pick up a copy for yourself. It’s a quick read and it gives you hour-by-hour instructions on how to create a web site from scratch with the application. And once you’re done, you’ll have a fully working and standards based web site at your disposal. I wrote it as the book I wish someone had written when I started out and from the response I’ve gotten so far people are learning a lot from it. Which is what I set out to do.

If you’re interested in a preview of the kind of content you’ll find in the book or you just want to know how to make a Pure CSS Drop-Down menu, you can read the full article, The No-Code Way to a Pure CSS Horizontal Drop-Down Menu with Expression Web, here or subscribe to the Expression Web Newsletter.