The navigation bar is an important consideration for your website, both in terms of design and usability. Visitors use it constantly to get to the different parts of your site, so if it is poorly designed or difficult to use your visitors may not enjoy using your site and be reluctant to return.
UPDATE: Since we wrote this post, LOADS more tutorials have hit the web! Check out our NEW 10 BEST jQuery Navigation Bar Tutorials post in our Free Resource section.
However a really well designed dynamic menu that’s easy to use can make your site stand out from the crowd. One of the most popular ways of creating animated navigation bars used to be Flash - however with the popularity of iPhones and iPads now (which don’t support Flash) no-one in their right mind would make their main navigation elements in Flash as it would render their site unusable on any device running iOS!
Read more about designing for mobile devices in our post about Responsive Web Designand the technologies it uses.
So – is this the end for animated navigation bars? Well – NO!
Enter jQuery and CSS! You can now create animated jQuery navigation bars that will display just fine on iOS. In some cases the full animated functionality might not work on mobile devices, but its still better than Flash which won’t display at all!
In this post we’ve collected together a range of tutorials that show how to create animated jQuery navigation bars (with our thoughts on each one!)
Update: Applications for the Leadership and Management Advisory Service training grant has now closed. We will make sure we announce the arrival of any similar schemes in the future.
£1000 Training Grants
Businesses who employ between 2 and 249 people can apply for up to £1,000 of matched funding towards any training courses that will help to develop their organisation’s people management skills. The new Leadership and Management Advisory Service (LMAS) is designed to help eligible employers fund training and development opportunities for their senior leaders.
If you are interested in applying and would like to discuss the courses we have available, please call us on 01273 622272 or emailinfo@siliconbeachtraining.co.uk
Is my Organisation Eligible for a Leadership & Management Training Grant?
The Leadership & Management Training Grants are open to any organisation which:
has 2 to 249 full time equivalent employees
can display the potential for high or fast growth, defined as:
if trading for more than 12 months have the potential to increase turnover by 20% each year for three years
if trading for less than 12 months have the potential to achieve a turnover of £500,000 within three years of trading
How Can I Apply for a Training Grant Towards a Course at Silicon Beach Training?
1) Identify Suitable Training
Identify the training course or courses that you would like to attend – remember, the courses must help you to increase your organisation’s people management skills – so the following courses would be applicable:
Since writing this we have attended Brighton SEO 2011, click the link to see our first blog post of the morning session and stay tuned for more to come.
Writing or blogging about trending topics can be a great way to generate traffic (and links) to your site, provided that your content is high quality and that you pick the right keywords to optimise on.
The second half of that equation can be the difference between loads of traffic and very little, so identifying what people want to read about (and more importantly, exactly what they are typing in to Google right now) is paramount. If you can be among the first to blog on a trending topic you can get your site on the front page of Google quickly, and bag the traffic (what’s more if you’re the first, you’re more likely to stay on the front page longer).
So – “how can I find trending topics?” At Friday’s BrightonSEO conference Malcolm Coles gave a very informative (and highly entertaining) presentation about how he used a variety of tools to discover trending topics when working on the celebrity news site HolyMoly, including some very interesting data on the searching habits of the Great British male!
Here are our video highlights from his presentation, along with a summary of the tools discussed (more information can also be found on Malcolm’s site here)….
News Search Tools: How to Find Trending Topics
We’ve split the video of Malcolm’s presentation in to two parts – the first summarises the News Search Tools used to identify Trending Topics. The second, which I couldn’t resist adding, is an example of how HolyMoly used these tools to exploit the search term ‘Karen Gillan Underwear‘, which reveals some interesting (and very amusing) trends in men’s searching patterns after they’ve watched Doctor Who!
#BrightonSEO Video: News Search Tools Summary
A summary of the News Search Tools mentioned is provided below, but do watch the video as Malcolm puts them nicely in to context with examples…
News Search Tools Summary:
Which of these tools you use will depend largely on the sort of content you publish…
HTML has had many incarnations over the years. All of these are similar, but successive refinements have been added over time to cope with our evolving understanding of the best way to make a website.
HTML5 has been on the radar for a while (in fact we wrote about its emergence in this blog in January 2010). As new browsers (including the new Firefox 4) start to support a wider range of HTML5 features, it’s use among developers is sharply on the rise. To meet demand we now offer a regular public HTML5 Training course, which builds on the knowledge gained in our existing HTML4 Training and CSS Training courses
We still get asked a lot of questions about the different versions of HTML – especially the differences between HTML4 and HTML5. Throw XHTML in to the mix and it can be a confusing picture for the uninitiated!
Win a free course at Silicon Beach Training via MyTrainingManager
We’ve teamed up with MyTrainingManager to offer you the chance to win a free training course at Silicon Beach Training with our simple ReTweet Competition.
Simply retweet our competition tweet, and follow @SBTTraining and @jen_mtm (Jennifer Tarjanyi from MyTrainingManager) to be in with a chance of winning a place on one of a great range of training courses here at our training centre in central Brighton. A list of the courses up for grabs, more details on how to enter and terms and conditions can be found below.
MyTrainingManager is a flexible and cost effective service providing business support, people management, development and training advice to businesses in the South East. Read our interview with MyTrainingManager’s Jennifer Tarjanyi in the blog last week to find out more.
Keep your eyes peeled on this blog this week too for more information about New Training Grants which could help you to access valuable courses for your staff.
How to enter our ReTweet Competition:
Its so easy, all you have to do is:
Retweet our competition tweet – or copy and paste the following in to a new tweet RT to Win a FREE course at Silicon Beach via MyTrainingManager (also follow @jen_mtm & @SBTTraining): http://bit.ly/eJsCO2
Interview with Jennifer Tarjyani from MyTraining Manager – plus a chance to win a free course
Jennifer Tarjanyi from MyTrainingManager recently attended our Blogging Training and Social Media Training courses, and we took the opportunity to catch up with her about what they are doing to help businesses in the south, and how their new MyTrainingManager service can help managers to make the most of their training budget by choosing training that is appropriate to their needs.
In addition to online marketing courses, Silicon Beach Training offers a wide range of Management Training, Leadership Training, Appraisals Training and Project Management Training courses (including PRINCE2 Training and MSP Training) in Brighton, Sussex. We will soon be launching a competition in partnership with MyTraining Manager to win a free course at Silicon Beach – more details to follow soon…!
Read on for our interview with Jennifer about the new MyTrainingManager service
So – you’ve set up a new blog and you’ve got loads of great ideas about interesting blog posts to write? But how is anyone ever going to know your blog exists?! Elsewhere on this blog we’ve explored how to use Social Media to promote individual blog posts – however there are some other steps you can take to make sure that your blog gets indexed as fast as possible – which we explore in more detail here.
If you’re new to blogging, we have a wide range of courses here at Silicon Beach that we run here in Brighton, Sussex that could help you, including our 1-day Blogging Training course, our WordPress Training and Advanced WordPress Training courses, and not to forget our Social Media Training and SEO Training courses to help you to promote your content.
As anyone who knows anything about SEO and Social Media will tell you – CONTENT IS KING – so the biggest favour you can do yourself it to write brilliant content on your blog that everyone will want to link to, thereby raising your profile.
However in addition to writing amazing content – there are some other simple things you can do to make sure you get found more easily…
The editors of Search Engine Land have been busy organising the schedule for the next SMX advanced program in London on May 16th and 17th . Search Marketing Expo has now been going for more than 10 years and has been attended by tens of thousands search marketeers.
The advanced expo in London is designed for professional or knowledgeable SEOer’s – the line up will be discussing cutting edge contemporary theory and tips, no wasting time going over the beginners SEO basics. They promise “Sessions are fast-paced, Q&A-packed, frequently controversial, always informative…”
Attending this conference allows SEO experts to connect with decision makers from the search engines, and other key industry stakeholders. You’ll be encouraged to participate in conversations orchestrated to debate thorny issues and move the industry forward. Some of the most accomplished and influential search marketers in the world will be revealing cutting edge tips for driving traffic, increasing paid search conversions, SEO, social media marketing and search analytics.
At Silicon Beach Training we understand that getting your delegates involved is a powerful learning technique so this approach should get you absorbing all those wonderful secrets and set you off thinking about search marketing in new and innovative ways.
HTML has had many incarnations over the years. All of these are similar, but successive refinements have been added over time to cope with our evolving understanding of the best way to make a website.
