Do you ever find yourself sitting in front of Photoshop for hours trying to mock up a decent navigation menu, or searching the web for the most aesthetically pleasing color palettes for your users to click on that doesn’t remind them of McDonalds or a funeral parlor?
Face it, sometimes we all lose our mojo for a moment or two, and then we are forced to validate ourselves not just to the W3C, but also to our website visitors, design clients and portfolio piranhas.
And then we remember that through the general kindness of a group of web designers and/or developers, and through organizations such as The Creative Commons who work to guarantee that kind freedom, we don’t always have to be the Picaso of style sheets.
CSS Tab Designer
CSS Tab Designer is a clean and very small desktop application for the Windows Operating System which doesn’t really bring much new to the drawing board, but what the application does nicely is it displays many various popular and well designed CSS menus, both vertical and horizontal. Some of which you’re likely to have seen on other websites, but through the flexibility of the menus’ respective Creative Commons Licenses, all have been incorporated into this small desktop application making it a snap to browse through over 60 designs to find that perfect one to serve as a base template to build upon, or to simply use as is.
In the image above (click for a better view) you can see how easily the program is set up and the true value of the program comes to life a bit.
If using a pre-designed CSS menu seems the better choice for you, you can simply select the design you prefer, edit your text links in the sidebar the application provides, and click the “Generate HTML & Images” button in the menu, and voila. You’ll have yourself a beautiful CSS menu completely customized to your needs with all of the images and XHTML valid code ready to be copy and pasted into your existing website.
The application isn’t all about using other designers’ CSS menus, although it absolutely prides itself on giving you that option. You can construct your own CSS menu with a bit of CSS (of course) and XHTML and view a live preview of how the menu might be interpreted by IE, Netscape, Opera, Firefox, Konqueror, Safari and Camino.
CSS Tab Designer is a freeware desktop application created by the OverZone Software development team.
Visit the official CSS Tab Designer webpage at OverZone Software.
CSS Tab Designer Contributors list.
