I’m new to the community. I have read the documentation, and am still unsure. I’m using the trial version and in the main navigation, I have “Work”, “About”, “Contact”. Under “Work” I want submenus “Packaging”, “Print”, “Logo”, “Everything Else”.
Would “Work” be a Menu item or a Button, or does it matter? Right now they are all buttons and I haven’t tried linking to anything. It’s also unclear to me what the difference is, or the benefit of one over the other.
I read in the documentation you can only have two levels of submenu, if that is so, is there a work-around so I can have my different sub areas?
To create a Sub Menu you’ll need to use Sparkle’s Menu.
To create a Sub Menu your can either add a “folder” in the Sparkle Menu window, as shown below…
Regarding the level depth of the Sparkle Sub Menu, you are correct. Sparkle doesn’t go beyond two levels deep. For the majority of websites in the wild 2 levels deep Sub Menus suffice.
The great thing about Sparkle is that it does not restrict you to one or the other. If you are just starting out then the method @FlaminFig shows works well.
I rarely use submenus so tend to use “buttons” arranged to look like a menu. This allows a little more flexibility in how you design the menu and can enable you to have pictorial elements in your menus as well as text. For example,
The “contact us” page is accessed via the envelope icon and the shopping basket by the embedded widget for Ecwid, which I use for my store.
There is no “Right Way” to do menus! So long as you make it easy for your users to find what they want on your site you can use either method. Take a look at some of the templates provided with Sparkle to see what can be achieved. Some, like Kenozersky don’t even have conventional menus!
Any problems you come across do ask here, there are many great contributors who will be only too happy to help and if you decide to purchase then you’ll find the Sparkle support provided by @duncan second to none!
Thank you FlaminFig, for explaining this and for a visual. Very helpful. Too bad about the submenus because in my world of print design, we have a lot of categories of work and two submenus are not enough. However, after your explanations, I think there’s a workaround I will try.
Hi @pinecone, just wanted to chime in on the two level submenus.
Multiple level menus do have their use cases, but they generally are hard to navigate because they require dexterity and they don’t translate well to mobile.
You’ll find that very large websites that have complex navigation are often solving this by using so called “mega menus”, which you can think of as a pane on which the multiple level menu is laid out flat (and enriched with graphics or other interactive elements).
Mega menus are slightly less dense than multi-level menus, but they are pretty great, and you can easily adapt them for mobile.
There’s some more detail in our popup documentation:
Thank you Duncan. In my case, I don’t think 4 items under a main menu is too large. But whatever, I am used to working with constraints and enjoy finding workarounds.
