Navigation menus used to be a fairly simple thing. Code up an unordered list, float it left and you’re good to go. With responsive design being all the rage these days though you’re faced with some new challenges when creating a menu design. If you are designing responsive navigation menu, so here are some useful tutorials to help you design responsive menu.

Responsive Navigation Patterns

Top and left navigations are typical on large screens, but lack of screen real estate on small screens makes for an interesting challenge. As responsive design becomes more popular, it’s worth looking at the various ways of handling navigation for small screen sizes. Mobile web navigation must strike a balance between quick access to a site’s information and unobtrusiveness.

Progressive And Responsive Navigation

Developing for the Web can be a difficult yet rewarding job. Given the number of browsers across the number of platforms, it can sometimes be a bit overwhelming. But if we start coding with a little forethought and apply the principles of progressive enhancement from the beginning and apply some responsive practices at the end, we can easily accommodate for less-capable browsers and reward those with modern browsers in both desktop and mobile environments.

Code a Responsive Navigation Menu

Follow along as we start from scratch and code a simple but effective responsive navigation menu that you can easily modify and reuse in your own projects.

Pull Down for Navigation

Mobile screen real estate is at a premium and one of the biggest problems to solve is how to display navigation when screen widths become quite narrow so I decided to have a look and see what I could come up with using some nifty CSS and a touch of jQuery.

Convert a Menu to a Dropdown for Small Screens

The Five Simple Steps website has a responsive design with a neat feature. When the browser window is narrow, the menu in the upper right converts from a regular row of links into a dropdown menu.

A Responsive Design Approach for Navigation

As we create responsive websites, we must consider a number of factors to make sure both the design and code are as bullet-proof as possible: the design must scale across a wide range of screen sizes from mobile to tablet to desktop; and the code must start with a mobile-first approach, work well for screen readers or with JavaScript disabled, and be robust enough to adapt to differences in text size and rendering across devices or user settings.