Changing your Menu Buttons Part 1

Lets start by logging in and going to Step 2 (Choose a Style). Click on “Menu Buttons”.
From the next two options, “Your Button Library” will contain all the buttons, which you have created as you experiment. “Our Button Library” offers a selection of ready-made buttons, which you can either take and use as they are or you can use them as a starting block and play around with them until you’re happy. One of the best things about your new button system is that with each style option you can see how your buttons look as you make changes to them by clicking the Show Me button at the bottom. 

First time on the buttons?… Try starting with one of ours.

Click “Our Button Library” and choose one of the buttons, which will provide you with the best starting point, such as one, which matches your website’s colour scheme. 

There are 9 ways that you can change the buttons: – Type, Position, Size, Spacing, Border and Font and then for the animation side of things – Rollover Colour, Rollover Font and Rollover Border. The Rollover options will determine how your buttons change whenever a visitor hovers their mouse over or clicks one of them.
Before you start though…there are a couple of things, which you’ll need to consider.

Vertical or Horizontal?

In the first option - Type, you’re offered a choice of Vertical or Horizontal menu buttons and multi-level buttons. You can add horizontal buttons to your website but you need to consider whether all your buttons will fit. Unlike vertical buttons, the horizontal space you have available is limited by the width of your website. If you have too many, your site will look messy with your buttons squashed together or running over onto a second row – NOT GOOD. If you want Horizontal buttons, you’ll first need to re-organise your web pages to create primary and sub pages by clicking the “Organise Pages” button at the top of the page. You need to create some main primary pages, try to keep it to around 6! Then rearrange your remaining pages to create sub menus under the relevant primary pages. Another thing to remember here is that long page names will create different sized buttons, which could look odd so try to keep your primary page names short and sweet! See the Blog on how to do this.

Once you’ve done this go back to the button wizard and in the type option, select Horizontal and enter the correct number of primary pages you’ve created. A small arrow will appear on each primary page button to show visitors where there are other pages to view and the sub menu page buttons will appear whenever visitors hover their mouse over. 

Secondly - your website may have been designed for vertical buttons (click to see this example which clearly shows a shaded area down the left column for vertical buttons) and so horizontal buttons may not fit. If this is the case you can request a customised website design in Step 2 to change the layout of your website to suit horizontal buttons.
Thirdly - if you’re changing from Vertical to Horizontal buttons your web pages will become much wider and your content will spread out, which may or may not work with the layout you’ve created.

In the next Blog we'll get the layout just right as we go through the position, size and spacing options available!

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