Developing a mobile-friendly navigation menu for your website

Published: Feb 13, 2023

I personally am a big fan of navbars as they are a clean way to navigate any website. The classic navbar, that you are likely seeing on this site if you are viewing this on a desktop browser, is extremely simple to make and you can easily find guides to develop these. The one I personally used is here. What was not as simple for me was creating a decent navbar for mobile. I had to develop it for a site that I was working on for my church that never concluded development. I copied it over to my personal site and learned a lot in the process of developing it so all was not wasted. It did however end up taking me way more time than it should have and in the hopes of saving some other poor soul some time, I decided to write an article about how I did it on my site.

If you want to check out how it looks like on my site before we get started, just shrink the width of your browser!

Fundamental approach

I decided that the simplest way to do what I wanted, was to design two completely separate navigation bars. One is used for larger screen widths while the other is used for smaller screen widths. This might not be the most elegant method but it certainly is simple. The <nav class="primary">, which is the default navigation bar, is therefore styled using the following code (excluding all actual styling code):

nav.primary{
    display: flex;
}

@media screen and (max-width: 768px){
    nav.primary{
        display: none;
    }
}

Now that we have briefly touched the primary navigation bar, let’s move on to styling the mobile navigation bar.

The mobile navigation menu that I am using is simple. What I wanted was a menu with items that would reveal itself after the user clicks the hamburger menu icon. To start, we need to style a menu that is hidden. The CSS for this menu is:

nav.mobile{
    transition: left 0.4s ease;
    position: fixed;
    top: 0;
    left: -50%;
    width: 50%;
    height: 100%;
    background: #665c54;
    z-index: 9999;
}

The z-index, height, top, width, and background properties create a rectangular block that is laid over the site. The transition property allows for smooth sliding when we move this element around when we open the menu. The final important property here is that we set left:-50% to hide the menu. We can then easily add items to this menu using a list, or just an item div (which is what I prefer) i.e.

nav.mobile .mobile-item{
    margin: 20px 10px;
}

Now we need an icon that we can click to open our menu. It turns out that it is possible to create a hamburger menu just using html and CSS. We won’t need Font Awesome for this. The html code for the hamburger menu is:

<div class="hamburger" id="Ham">
    <div class = "bars" >
        <span class="bar"></span>
        <span class="bar"></span>
        <span class="bar"></span>
    </div>
</div>

We put our <span class='bar'> inside of a <div class = "hamburger">. By default we have <div class="hamburger" hidden while the <span class="bar"> is what actually forms the icon. The CSS code for this is:

.hamburger {
    display: none;
}

.bar {
    display: block;
    width: 25px;
    height: 3px;
    margin: 5px auto;
    -webkit-transition: all 0.3s ease-in-out;
    transition: all 0.3s ease-in-out;
    background-color: #FFF;
}

.bars{
    display : block;
    position: absolute; 
    top: 20%; 
    left: 20%;
}

I was not able to create a close symbol that looked nice so I ended up using Font Awesome as shown below:

html:
<div class = "hamburger">
    ....
    <div class = "close">
        <i class="fa-solid fa-xmark fa-2x"></i>
    </div>
</div>

CSS:
close{
    display: none;
}

It should be noted that <div class="hamburger">, contains both <div class="bars"> and <div class="close">. This icon is activated at smaller screen sizes, i.e.

@media screen and (max-width: 768px) {
    .hamburger{
        display: block;
        margin: 20px 0;
        position: fixed;
        top: 15px;
        left: 45px;
        height: 45px;
        width: 45px;
        text-align: center;
        border-radius: 3px;
        cursor: pointer;
        transition: left 0.4s ease;
        background-color: #696969;
        z-index: 9999;
}

Now that we have a hidden menu and the hamburger icon to open it, we need to add a javascript function that activates on click. I won’t describe how to link .js files, this is a pretty simple thing to look up. To enable our responsive menu, we need one javascript function described below.

/* Toggle between adding and removing the "responsive" class to 
the nav when the user clicks on the icon */

function myFunction() {
    var x = document.getElementById("Nav");
    if (x.className === "primary") {
      x.className += " responsive";
    } else {
      x.className = "primary";
    }
    var x = document.getElementById("Ham");
    if (x.className === "hamburger") {
      x.className += " responsive";
    } else {
      x.className = "hamburger";
    }

    var children = x.children;
     if (children[0].className === "bars") {
      children[0].className += " responsive";
    } else {
      children[0].className = "bars";
    }     
     if (children[1].className === "close") {
      children[1].className += " responsive";
    } else {
      children[1].className = "close";
    }     

    var x = document.getElementById("Navmobile");
    if (x.className === "mobile") {
      x.className += " responsive";
    } else {
      x.className = "mobile";
    }

}

This function simply toggles the class of the divs that comprise our mobile navigation menu. By default, these divs start out with just a mobile class. This function then adds the responsive class when called. If the class already has the responsive class, it removes it. We can then define additional styling for the responsive elements. The most obvious step of opening the menu can be done simply by setting the left margin to 0, i.e:

nav.mobile.responsive {
    left: 0;
}

As a note we also want to adjust the hamburger menu to a red close symbol by changing the position and color of the menu and also setting display none to the bars which make up the original hamburger menu.

.hamburger.responsive{
    left: 55%;
    cursor: pointer;
    background-color: #ff6347;
}

.bars.responsive{
    display: none;
}

.close.responsive{
    display: block;
    color: #FFF;
    position: absolute;
    top: 4px;
    left: 10px;
}

I am certainly not an expert in javascript and am self-taught in html and css so this code might not be optimized, but it gets the job done and makes me happy!

Conclusion

Hopefully this is helpful to someone. I figure I’m probably just tossing this into the void but maybe it will end up being useful to someone. If you have any comments or find any errors shoot me an email! Would love to know if anyone actually is using this stuff.

Alex Selimov

Developing a mobile-friendly navigation menu for your website

Fundamental approach

Designing a mobile navigation bar

Creating a hamburger menu icon to open our menu

Opening the menu using javascript

Conclusion