A little different format to this blog post, but I need to post about this somewhere.

Part of my day job is designing a number of layouts for client websites and themes. On a good week, I will have designed 5 or 6 different rough concepts, general layout and colour scheme. Like so many other designers, I draw a lot of inspiration from the million and two CSS galleries out there, so I spend a lot of time browsing nice sites. It even inspired me to start my own gallery.

Most of the designs that I create are designed with WebAdmin in mind, because almost all the sites we create use WebAdmin as a back end. One of the features of WebAdmin is that clients can manage their own menu, so if there's a new product line, or affiliate, or whatever, they are free to make that change themselves. This, obviously, restricts my ability to create certain kinds of menus. Generally speaking, we don't use images - css offers a lot of options that make this restriction negligable. Another major concern, however, is creating horizonatal menus - the ones that run across the top of the page as opposed to vertical, running down the side. With vertical menus, if a client adds too many menu items, this can potentially break the layout - something we'd obviously like to avoid! As a result, if it's a client that we *know* is going to be very active with their website and make a lot of changes, I quite often will suggest a vertical menu structure which will allow them to add as many top level menu items as they like without comprimising the layout of the website.

So, here I am, working on a Monday morning, designing a wireframe for one of these types of clients. I'm doing my usual browse-around-for-inpiration kind of thing and am noticing a HUGE lack of vertical menus being featured on most of the css galleries. Is this becoming a trend? I know Neilson advocates vertical menus - but pretty designs seem to all have them running across the top? What does this mean for the growing industry of CMS (content managed) websites? Is something like a "menu manager" out of the question to create really slick designs? All these questions...

So there are my thoughts. I personally like the look of horizontal menus a lot better than vertical, but as with most things, there is a time and place for both styles. I think I'm going to make an effort to look for more designs with vertical menus and feature them on dailylove.