This project was my first attempt at creating an “interesting” navigation long ago, before I knew about such fancy things as image replacement or multiple-state images. Everybody uses plain old tabs at the top of the page, so I wanted to try something different. There were a few challenges I had to overcome with this project:
#1: I had never heard of image replacement or anything like that (I later discovered that deep within my web design book). I knew that I wanted to make buttons, and that somehow I had to get the images to play nice with the navigation that was made with an unordered list. So what to do? I spent many hours in front of the computer screen, and eventually figured out that I could make the buttons the same size as the background image.
#2: I didn’t know that you could have one image that would work for three different states! I wanted different images for normal, hover, and active. I made it work, but the loading kills it.
#3: Internet Explorer hates it. But I hate IE, so we’re even. Ha!
Does it work? Kinda. If I did it over again with my newfound knowledge, I’d use image replacement for the buttons, and include all three states in one image, for a total of four images instead of twelve. And maybe make it work for IE, but only if I was really bored.
