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MenuMachine for Golive can be found here: www.menumachine.com,
all Big Bang Solutions' Extensions here www.bigbangextensions.com
Adobe's GoLive HTML Editor used to build this site
www.adobe.com/products/golive/main.html
Other GoLive Actions and Extensions are available at Adobe Studio Exchange
Main Website of de Nijs Design, producer of this small site is here
www.denijsdesign.de (contact the maker of this small site, me :-), Beate de Nijs, directly via Mail here)
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FAQs will be answered at the MenuMachine Website of BigBang Solutions, especially recommended is visiting the superb forum there!
And please do have a look at the thoroughly manual at GoLive's Menubar/ Help/ MenuMachine Help!
MenuMachine makes it very easy to build a variety of clever menues. It cost the developer enormous efforts to make such a handy extension available and eliminate all browser issues.
Also: You can still add traditional hide/show menu layers to MenuMachine items to meet specific menu wishes not covered by MenuMachine yet.
One minor things is that no special css can be applied yet to the menu - this can be only met by using image menuitems as usually or by directly typing the appropiate class tags into the text fields (see my soon updated sample 'css enhanced menu'). But I am already experimentating with setting css for the menu containing css ... wait and see what workarounds I might find ;-9
To meet the rare occasion of having users set the textzoom to larger font, make the labels large enough to not cut any topic. or make it of a size that the meaning of the labels will be even clear when some letters get cut.
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I've seen many menues built with MenuMachine by now and under those impressions I try to give some advice here for the first menu you are going to build:
Best Menu Building Devices don't automatically make website navigation easy! The user can still stir around confused if the website structure, the logical seperation of sections, the sensible naming of menu items has not thoroughly been thought over and over again and nailed down to the essential clear few ones.
Also for accessibility reasons – don't forget that screenreaders or users navigating from link to link with the tab key which becomes really time-consuming when there are more than 20 links on a page (as the link tabbing always starts at page code top).
Large menues - text or image - always take time to render in the browser, so test pages with real amounts of real links are neccessary to find a good compromize of menu size and d'l time.
I've seen menues of 30 items and more with normal and different hover images that had to be rendered on every page - this is too much for a user's patience.
Too large menues do only confuse a visitor who has to look through too many items all over again and again. Don't force every link on every page. Sensible site and menu structure is essential for easy navigation e.g. split the menu up into section specific ones.
Also test in various browsers, Mozilla, Camino, Safari e.g. are very good at rendering/caching while Explorer and Netscape are slower.
Some users don't spend enough time on finding a nice and matching colour combination in respect of an overall design concept of the website. To make a menu obvious it isn't necessary to apply many different or colours of strong contrasts or use all sorts of borders, arrows, shadows. A menu must be easily found and readable but not distract the user from the content of the page he tries to read.
Many think, the more contrast the colour combinations are the more impressive is the hover effect... In fact this is more often irritating to the user and a stress to the eye. To make a roll-over obvious it's often sufficient to only make either the background colour or the font (or both) a bit lighter or darker in the shade. Try this first instead of using e.g. pink text on green for normal state and green text on pink for roll-over...
There is the possibility to change the default black arrows to any kind of symbol and colour. You can edit those images as you wish. For correct vertical alignment with the text in the various browser better not change the height of those images (though there might be some nice experiments possible :-)
When you have created own triangle images and saved them into a folder in your sitewindow, close the page you want to use it on, highlight it in the sitewindow, open the in/out links palette and point&shoot the default triangles to your individual ones.
When you have some menues that have further submenues but not all, it's more userfriendly to indicate those further submenues by using the arrows. I often move with my cursor quickly over menues and overlook a further submenu - it appears for a second while I move further and have to go back some items to search where that submenu actually appears... An arrow would show me clearly where to expect a further submenu.
Also try not to have too many levels of submenues as it takes the user a long time to wade through (and by accident move out with the cursor too quickly and having to start all over again) or to look for an item he remembered to have seen somewhere...
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And this website was created, of course, on an Apple Power Macintosh G4, by usage of Adobe GoLive CS2 and Adobe Photoshop CS2.
As I have only one page per sample I did not use components or templates to create this site, but of course MenuMachine works fine in both, allowing quick and easy menu changes all over a whole website.
Special codebits that make handling this site in GoLive very handy were not stripped out at uploading this site to the webserver, so GoLive users who want to analyse pages on their computer can do this easily in the GoLive inspectors instead of having to read through the code.
If I had uploaded the site stripped all pages would appear appr. 1/4 smaller in filesize.
I you let run sites unstripped through w3c validators, errors will be shown because of the GoLive specific tags, those tags make handling sites so comfortable with the sitemanagement, so they are superb for editing. At uploading your sites do always strip them out.
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