Hello Janine,

I am almost all the way through your Dreamweaver videos on Kelby Training, and they are great. Thanks.

One thing I have not seen yet (and don’t see in the lesson titles I have left) is how to create a drop-down or fly-out menu in Dreamweaver.

I have searched online and found a lot of conflicting information on how to do it. Since you are such a good instructor, I thought it would be great if you presented that technique somehow/somewhere. Thanks for any help you could give to the rest of us on that topic!

Thanks,
Doug

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Hi Doug,

Thank you so much for your kind words about my videos at KelbyTraining.com.

How to create and edit drop-down menus with Dreamweaver’s Spry feature is a topic I want to address, but I haven’t had a chance to get into those advanced features yet in my videos. There is a lot to cover when it comes to Web design, but I do hope to add some video lessons on these features in the future.

I do have a couple of written tutorials on the topic that may help you; the following URLs will take you right to them.

How to create drop-down menus (or fly-out menus)  in Adobe Dreamweaver

Tips for editing a drop-down or fly-out menu in Dreamweaver

Two things to keep in mind.

First, these tutorials were done with Dreamweaver CS4, but the features did not change in version CS5, so they should work with either program.

Second, drop-down menus combine XHTML, CSS, and Javascript, which makes them considerably more complex to work with than many of the other features in Dreamweaver, especially when it comes to making sure your pages look and work well in many different Web browsers.

The Spry features in Dreamweaver offer a great shortcut to creating Javascript, but they’re not perfect, and if you run into problems, they can be complex to troubleshoot (I tell you that not to scare you off, just to warn you). In general, if you keep the drop-downs at the top of the page, they seem to work better than if you try to integrate them in the middle of a page design. Also make sure you don’t have any Flash files that may overlap with the drop-downs, or the menus will get lost behind the Flash file.

Finally, to make sure you drop-down menus work well across different computers and browsers, consider using the services in this tutorial on my site.

I sincerely hope that helps you and I wish you all the best with your Web designs,
Janine