Marino from TechSymptom is great web-designer and started a series of Fireworks tutorials on web 2.0 styled navigation bars. The last one inspired me to create this small CSS tutorial.

After we finished the tutorial we need to create 2 simple images to style our CSS navigation bar: A background image (the light blue bar) and a transparent button that indicate the active state, all other elements are created with CSS.

Like in most CSS horizontal navigation bars an unordered list is used to hold the menu items:

With the next CSS code it’s possible to style the horizontal navigation bar:

#container {
width:800px;
height:600px;
padding:20px;
}
ul#navbar {
background:url(/tutorials/web20_css_bar/backgr.jpg) repeat-x left top;
margin:0;
border-bottom:3px solid #98CB00;
border-top:1px solid #00CCFF;
list-style-type:none;
height:31px;
}
ul#navbar li {
float:left;
}
ul#navbar li a {
display:block;
padding:5px 15px 4px;
font:bold 16px "Trebuchet MS";
text-decoration:none;
color:#00CCFF;
letter-spacing: -0.1em;
}
ul#navbar li a:hover {
color:#98CB00;
}
ul#navbar li a#current {
background:url(/tutorials/web20_css_bar/current.gif) no-repeat center bottom;
color:#98CB00;
}

We placed the background image behind ul element and added the two borders to the top and bottom. The li element is defined as a floated block element and got some padding to create a bigger button. The last definition is for the current state, which will show up the tri-angle. You need some server-side code (php) to get a dynamic position every time a different page is loaded.

That’s all, download the example files here.