How to Create a Horizontal Scrollable Menu: A Step-by-Step Guide
Have you ever visited a website and been impressed by a sleek horizontal scrollable menu? It’s an elegant solution for displaying a plethora of options without overwhelming your webpage. In today’s tutorial, we’ll dive deep into creating a horizontal scrollable menu.
What is a Horizontal Scrollable Menu?
A horizontal scrollable menu is a type of navigation bar where items can be scrolled from left to right. It’s especially useful for websites with a large number of menu items or for responsive designs where screen space is limited.
Step 1: Setting Up the Basic HTML Structure
Start by creating the fundamental HTML structure for our menu:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<title>Horizontal Scrollable Menu</title>
</head>
<body>
<div class="scroll-menu">
<a href="#item1">Item 1</a>
<a href="#item2">Item 2</a>
<!-- Add more items as needed -->
</div>
</body>
</html>
Step 2: Styling with CSS
The magic behind our horizontal scrollable menu lies in two crucial CSS properties: overflow:auto and white-space: nowrap.
-
overflow:auto: This property ensures that if the content overflows the container’s boundaries, scrollbars will appear. In our case, we specifically use overflow-x: auto to enable horizontal scrolling only. -
white-space: nowrap: This property prevents the content from wrapping to the next line, ensuring that all menu items stay in a single horizontal line, ready to be scrolled.
By combining these two properties, we achieve the desired scrollable effect for our navbar.
Here is the full CSS to make our menu scrollable:
.scroll-menu {
white-space: nowrap;
overflow-x: auto;
display: flex;
border: 1px solid #ccc;
padding: 10px;
}
.scroll-menu a {
margin-right: 20px;
text-decoration: none;
color: #333;
padding: 5px 10px;
border: 1px solid transparent;
transition: all 0.3s;
}
.scroll-menu a:hover {
background-color: #f5f5f5;
border-color: #333;
}
Step 3: Testing the Scrollable Menu
Open your HTML file in a browser. Resize the browser window to see the menu items become scrollable when they can’t fit the screen width.
Conclusion
Creating a horizontal scrollable menu is a stylish and functional way to present numerous options to your website’s visitors. The trick is to use the two css properties: overflow:auto and white-space: nowrap.
Happy coding!