Note: This is our second tutorial on customizing Spry menu bars in Dreamweaver CS3. The first covered customizing horizontal menu bars. Many of the steps for creating and customizing vertical menu bars are the same as those for horizontal menu bars. That information is repeated here so you won’t have to refer back to the previous article.
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I should start by saying that Adobe has done an excellent job implementing spry menu bars in DWCS3. More to the point, they have documented the CSS files that control the appearance of the menu bars with ample notes to guide the adventurous. They’ve even included a help file that’s actually helpful. Still, in my experience, a program’s documentation is the last place people look for help so I’ve put together this little tutorial.
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My recent post, 50 Common Web Design Mistakes elicited this comment from Wild over at Digg:

These are programming mistakes. Not DESIGN mistakes.

Maybe I sound a bit arrogant, but their [sic]is a difference between a web designer and a web programmer. Its [sic] one the industry needs to understand as it leads to a lot of confusion when it comes to hiring people.

I suppose, if my definition of web design was limited to arranging pixels, I might agree with him but there is more to web design than making pretty pictures on a monitor. According to (who else) Wikipedia, design

…normally requires a designer [to consider] aesthetic, functional, and many other aspects of an object or process…

It’s the “functional, and many other aspects” of web design that people like Wild ignore. In this area I grudgingly give credit to the “experience design” movement for recognizing that the ultimate purpose of design is not to create a printed piece of paper, an attractive arrangement of pixels or an imposing building. The purpose of design is to create an interaction with, or experience for, the end-user using those created objects (real and virtual).
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While putting this site together, my son and I engaged in an argument about the ideal width of web pages.

Based upon the standard advice I give my web design students I argued for a 760 pixel width which, even with scroll bars, can easily be accommodated on an 800 by 600 pixel monitor.

He, on the other hand, argued for a wider design - somewhere in the neighborhood of 960 pixels. The advantages were obvious: we’d have additional design flexibility and be able to move to a three-column design. He also argued that people with small monitors just weren’t worth worrying about (he can be a bit judgmental).
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