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Help with Drop Down Menu

Page with issues is:
http://bookkarma.bravehost.com/testing.html

Ok, I have a few issues with this:

1/ At the moment, the drop down background is semi-transparent. It is coloured but you can see the page writing through it, which obscures the link text. How do I change this, so the page text is not visible under the drop down box?

2/Most of my links don't exist yet, because I want to get the code right first, but some of my links lead to existing bravenet services and these don't seem to be working either. The links are:
What Did I Think? (should go to blog)
Free To Roam (should go to catalogue)
Places I Enjoy (should go to freelinks)
Cartoon (should go to cartoon page)
Today In History (should go to This Day in History)
Divination (should go to horoscopes)
Vote here (should go to vote poll - the single poll with multiple questions one)
Where Are You? (should go to guest map)
Compliments (should go to guestbook)
Karma Calendar (should go to calendar)
FAQ (should go to free faq page)

3/I want the main buttons to be links as well. How do I do this?

You can view the page at:

http://bookkarma.bravehost.com/testing.html

I haven't added the code to my index page yet, as I want to get it right first.

Thanks in advance.

Nurture

Re: Help with Drop Down Menu

You don't ask for much, do you? I guess we will just start at the top.

It may appear that the menu is transparent, and that you are seeing the text through it, but that is not the case. The text is really in front of the menu. Web page objects are sensitive to the order they are defined. On your page, you define the header section first. You follow that with the menu Javascript, the main menu, and then the

structures that contain the dropdown items. This is then followed by the content area of your page, that contains some text.

The
structures for the dropdown menu items are declared "hidden", and do not initially take up any page space. This allows the content area to display right below the main menu, effectively overlaying the dropdown portion of the menu. But the
structures for the dropdown menu items should also have a "z-index" declaration, that would put the dropdown menu items "in front" of the content area text. If the "visibility" attribute was changed to "visible" the menu items would appear in front of anything in the content area. The "z-index" effectively overrides the normal display ordering.

But your
structures don't have a "z-index", they have a "z-ndex". To your browser, this is a unknown declaration and it ignored. Change all instances of "z-ndex" to "z-index", and your menu will work properly. It looks like you clipped the code out of a posting on the "Hscripts.com" rather than actually use their menu tool. I used their menu too and received correct code, but going through their forum, I noticed the misspelling. This is because the "Hscripts.com" user forum disables any attempt to use a "z-index". It's just a security issue. That's not much different than this forum. Try using the word "OnMouseOver" in a post. Next time, don't copy from the forum, use the menu tool.

Also, at the very least, you should credit the site where you obtained the code, with a simple comment in your web page code. Then, anyone trying to help wouldn't have to try and figure out were the code came from.

By fixing the "z-index" issue, all of your links should connect to the URL you specified in the link.

The main buttons can be configured as links, but it takes a bit of work. Your first menu item looks like the following.

Biography

To make the word "Biography" be a link you need to wrap it in a anchor tag, .... with a "href" defined. Something like the following would work. Of course, you would change the "href" to the page name that you want to reference.

Biography

But, once you make all these adjustments, you will probably find that the links don't act exactly the way you want them to. The default color will change, as will the coloring when the mouse is hovering. To manage the coloring in the main menu items and the sub menu items, you will have to add a couple of style definitions.

The style settings that are included in the menu code look like this:



You should modify them so that they look something like the following. The extra styles will let you manage the link coloring of the main menu items and sub menu items independent of each other, and independent of the other links on your page. Adjust them as you see fit. The colors that I used were totally arbitrary.



Then, to each of your main menu links, you will need to add a "class" definition. Then you can adjust the colors in the styles to manage the menu text coloring during various mouse operations.

class="menu_main" href="bio_page.html">Biography

If you have trouble digesting all of this, let me know. I can generate a fully working page for you and give you a Zip file link.

p.s. Don't try posting code like I do, until you learn how. It's not as simple as it looks.

Re: Help with Drop Down Menu

The problems you report seem to be an Explorer thing. In my browser, there is no transparency, and the links work (well, the first 3 or 4 you mentioned, anyway, didn't test all).

This may not have anything to do with the problem, but I noticed one more thing wrong with your site in Explorer. There is a user-hostile script turning my cursor into something else (yes, the cursor is mine. Page is yours, but the cursor isn't part of it) Try taking that down, and see if the problem is related. Either you have solved the problem, or you have only improved your page.

Re: Help with Drop Down Menu

I fully agree with Corwings on that one. Except for the fact that I still see the transparency, in all browsers.

That cursor manipulation only works for Internet Explorer. Firefox and Netscape, I am glad to say, simply ignores it. I understand that it's an affiliate link, and you probably get some credits for clicks, but all it does is drive away visitors. There are more subtle ways of doing that kind of thing.

Get one thing fixed, before you start cluttering it up with other things.

Re: Help with Drop Down Menu

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!

I know it was a lot to ask and your time is valuable, so I do appreciate your help.

I just copy and pasted the code they gave me after they generated my menu. It worked fine on their example and I had no idea what code was supposed to be there and what wasn't. Thank you for clearing that up for me.

I had meant to acknowledge the website with a link at the bottom of my page. I obviously forgot to save it, though. Thank you for pointing that out to me, it has been rectified.

That annoying mouse thing has been removed, too. I don't want to drive my visitors away!

Thanks again for all of your help. Now that my page design is perfect, I can finally get started on my content.