Tutorial: Create a pure CSS navigation menu for your web apps
You’ve heard the saying, “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover.” It’s good advice, but largely ignored. Whether consciously or subconsciously, we pass judgements based on appearance on a daily basis.
This fact is especially important in business. Studies have shown that people judge a web page/app in less than one second. What does that mean? If you’re building apps for customers or prospects, appearance can affect revenue. If you’re building for internal users, it can affect usability.
Don’t get me wrong–I’m not telling you to focus solely on appearance. I’m telling you not to ignore appearance, because like it or not, an app is judged by it’s appearance first, and usefulness second.
How can you improve your application’s appearance? There are a few ways, but one of the best and easiest way is the navigation menu. A well-designed navigation menu will improve the overall look and feel as well as the usability of the web app. If you’d like to learn a simple way to create a good-looking navigation menu using CSS, we’ve written up a tutorial, which you can find here.
For more tips on usability, this article gives a few more ideas.
If your company plans on building mobile apps this coming year, or if you just wish there was a faster way to develop enterprise web applications, you should really try the newly revamped m-Power Trial.
You’ve probably seen those strange-looking black and white boxes (like the one on the left) popping up all over the place. You may have seen them on bus stations, websites, business cards, and more. What are they, and should my business pay attention to them?
Suppose you’re buying a new computer. You find a great-looking computer at a local store, bring it home, boot it up, and…it’s extremely slow. You open up the case only to discover that all of the internal parts are at least 10 years old. You storm back to the store demanding your money back because they sold you an old computer. Their response: “Of course it’s new, look at the new, beautiful case we put it in.”
Building a customer/vendor portal (also called an extranet) is a tricky task. Typically, one portal must display different data to different users. If one user logs in and sees data that they shouldn’t see, you’ll have a big problem on your hands.