Menu Options - Some Samples
In the last 18 months of creating skins for clients, we've not delivered a single solpart or dnn NAV solution. That's how confident I am that Snapsis delivers reliable and elegant solutions. And, I've not had a single support request or problem with these sites. What has occurred is that when handing over skins that have this type of menu, many of the IT & web support people have appreciated that it has familiar territory with the css code that is dropped in, and they are able to confidently make changes, even if they are not familiar with DNN.
I have provided some links to sites that have had the snapsis menu implemented and encourage you to look at them and appreciate that this really is a flexible solution takes away hours of development, by using templating and the ability to
Here are some examples and overview on how they have been used, and when you understand the diversity and light weight options of this menu, you'll appreciate it's purpose.
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Beautiful, highly configurable menu sub menu actions
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Snapsis allows for quite complex menu structures, including top level and sub level menus which have active and non active status.
For designers wanting to implement different colours and depth to the the look and feel, this option is perfect and it is highly configurable. Using either images or colours, it's a relatively easy job to change the look and feel.
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Customisable Graphical Menus
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There are times when you can't get the look you want with words and colours, so the ability to configure a beautiful graphical menu is something can do with the Snapsis Menu. It gives you the flexibility to be creative, without compromising compatibility.
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Configurable Second Level Menus
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Snapsis menu allows you to configure dropdown menus at mutiple levels as shown by these examples. Second and third level menus can often be very complex and time consuming to create. Once you understand how the Snapsis Menu works, you will soon learn that it's capabilities far exceed many other third party menus that are available on the market.
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Macro Menu configuration
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The option to drill down and configure individual active tabs shows the diversity of the templating system. Complex menus, meeting customers expectations and delivering compliant menus without eating into your developing time means you can confidently quote even trick projects with customers who may be more demanding.
I like the concept of being able to make customers happy without breaking the bank. The issue I've found in many instances is that you try to make customers happy but they have no idea how much time you've spent without being compensated, learning, testing and researching something to get it finished.
To do this sort of menu with a standard out of the box dnn menu or solpart menu is virtually impossible. I can't say the word 'impossible' because I've not tried it since we have long given up on using the default menus from DNN. This is not a reflection on the product, but more a 'pat on the back' for them providing us with choices.
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Background Images in Sub Menus
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There are times when the sub menus are difficult to configure background images with. They don't always show up in other browers, but since Snapsis uses a unique templating system, and uses other well constructed and tested menus, it's ideal for designs like this that require the use of background images to create specific effects.
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Multi Menu capabilities which are highly configurable (and work)
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I particularly like this option - where the client required a point of difference and this was achieved by providing customised css to the tab / page level. That is how configurable this menu is and still maintains it's integrity and is extremely lightweight. Customers don't always understand the issues with developing cross browser compatible websites and it's left to the skinning professional to implement their client requests.
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Elegant menu options, configurable and accurate
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Too often, with dynamic, database driven sites, it's easy to overlook how your clients apply sub pages into the site. Some designs, such as the one shown here, don't have dropdown menus. They can have, but sometimes you, as a design may prefer to keep them hidden, and as you can see here, even without dropdown menus, as you navigate to the top level page, the sub menu is well displayed and fits in with the design beautifully.
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Search Engine Friendly, XHTML compliant with page descriptions upon hover
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One thing you'll find about the Snapsis Menu is how it automatically displays the description of the page upon hover. This well crafted menu is design to allow search engines to filter their way through the pages and can improve your search engine rankings. While I still believe that content is king, making a site conform to what the search engines require in formatting for ease of indexing and spidering must help you in your quest for happy clients who feel their new site is going to benefit them.
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Easy to deploy active, hover & non active state menus
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One thing Snapsis Menu does very well is the Active, Hover, and Non Active state. This is incredibly important to know because the standard out of the box DNN menu does not offer you the same ease of deployment and is no where as compliant as the Snapsis menu is. I can't imagine using anything but the Snapsis menu in our site development.
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Accurate, elegant and lightweight - Snapsis Menu
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Just look at this beautiful action - accurate, easy to configure, search engine friendly, XHTML & CSS compliant, fast and lightweight. If you're a novice who doesn't know much about skinning, this is for you, and if you are a skilled, professional designer, providing skins for clients, then the developer menu is for you.
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Multiple Menu / Sub Menu display
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Let me explain a couple of things here so you can understand how diverse this menu is - In this job, we had a menu that was hard coded, because they couldn't get the menus to work with just 'some' of the items displaying. This was going to be a problem later on when they replicated this portal for their customers, and the idea was to keep it dynamic.
We were able to put in two menus, and this is something that beginners may not be aware of, but it's quite tricky to manipulate the menus when we are talking about top level and sub level menus.
As shown in the picture above, the top menu has women, mens, childrens, but where the arrow is, shows the childrens, top level only, the mens menu including sub levels and womens menu including sub levels. It still needs tweaking, but you can sese how we have been able to keep the integrity of 'dynamic menus' and give the customer what they want, without them having to go in and touch a single thing.
This menu is also able to be localised - and that's of great benefit to anyone doing multi national sites as this portal is. It will replicated, identically across 15 - 20 European nations where they can take advantage the incredible portability and replication options with DotNetNuke.
You won't be able to get this in just any menu!! Snapsis really is the designers choice of menu.
The images below depict how the menus are named - Level 1 and Level 2, and how they all work seamlessly to solve a problem for a client. Great hey!! I am particularly impressed with this ability to solve this problem and so is the client as we are able to deploy and deliver sites at a much faster rate.
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I can't stress the importance enough of delivering solutions that give confidence in the DNN product to which XD Design have built their business model on, and how we believe that using a third party solution does not detract from DotNetNuke, but in fact encourages people to understand the concept of what this solution is about. Yes, I know there are other products on the market - but it seems that too often DNN is given a hard time for reasons I think are just not really valid except to lessen the credibility of an open source Microsoft based solution.
What you will find with plenty of Joomla solutions for example, are wrappers that are built around open source solutions and embedded into sites, not dissimilar to what Snapsis has done. Some of these elements are free, but many of them require using third party products that are not free or part of subscriptions to sites providing downloads to joomla users. The point is, they use existing open source and publicly available and the use of DotNetNuke and the 'third party providers' is such a elegant solution that is based around using existing technology.
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