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Add, customize, and reuse a Navbar.
In this lesson:
To add a Navbar, scroll to the Components section of the Add panel and drag a Navbar element into your project.
You can place the Navbar anywhere in your project — there's no right or wrong way to do this. Since the Navbar is self-contained, you can move where and whenever you like. For our example, we’ll place it at the top, directly inside our body element.
Our navbar holds a group of elements all placed neatly inside a container that keeps content centered on the page.
Let’s add a logo to our navbar.
Head to the Assets panel in the left panel of the Designer where you can upload and manage assets. Click Upload in the upper right corner and choose the file(s) you’d like to upload. We’ll drag our logo image into the Brand link.
It’s standard practice for a brand image or logo to link back to the homepage. To do this:
The second component of the navbar is the nav menu. This component holds our nav links. By default, the navbar comes with a few nav link placeholders you can edit, delete, or add.
To add more Nav links:
Another way to add nav links is to copy and paste a nav link that already has a class applied to it. This is a great time saver if you plan on styling multiple nav links. To do this:
When you duplicate this nav link, the class is already applied to each new one you paste. Now, you can double-click the nav link to edit the text inside.
To link each nav link to a different source:
The Navbar element is very flexible when it comes to styling.
In this section, we'll focus on 5 areas that give us that control:
The Navbar element has no preset values for width or height.
When the navbar is dropped inside of the body, section, or another element it will take up the full width of that element. You can constrict the Navbar horizontally by setting a width or by constricting the width of the parent element. .
The height of the navbar is determined by the content inside. Specifically that means the height of the brand logo, or the height of the nav links. You can adjust the height of the navbar in a number of ways:
You can add padding to the nav links by selecting a nav link and adjusting the top and bottom padding. The size of the nav link and the navbar adjusts accordingly. You can also add margin to achieve a similar effect.
A more uniform approach might be to select the navbar and adjust its padding. Increasing the padding adds more height because it creates extra space between the navbar and the container that holds all the Navbar elements.
You can also make similar changes to the nav menu which appears on devices that have the Mobile icon set to visible. You can open the nav menu to access it by selecting the navbar and clicking Open Menu under the Settings panel.
Adjusting the height of nav links on touch devices is really helpful to make sure that the size of your tap targets is large enough for finger taps. Learn more about the Nav Menu Button
This is where classes help out a lot. Classes save styling information you can apply to as many elements as you want throughout your project. The moment you begin styling an element, a class is automatically created and applied to the selected element. All styling adjustments made to this element are saved in this class. You can also create a class manually, before adding styles, by typing in a class name in the selector.
You can access the selector either by:
Now, we can apply the same class to each of the nav links so changes to that class affect all the links in the navbar at once.
You can also style nav nink backgrounds in their default and hover state. For the hover state, activate the hover state and set a background. This background will be visible when a user hovers over the nav link.
One of the simplest ways to visually indicate that the mouse is hovering on a link is a color change on hover. Select the Hover state from the States menu and choose a different font color. Learn more on how to style the various states of a link including the Current auto-state.
Apply the same class to each of the nav links so changes to that class affect all the links in the Navbar at once.
The menu button is an element inside the navbar that organizes the nav links when there is limited horizontal space, like on a mobile device. It’s sometimes called a hamburger menu. The menu button and its functionality are built into the navbar element and can be accessed and configured in a number of ways.
By default, the nav menu button appears on Tablet breakpoint and below. You can go to preview mode and see the menu appear in your navbar when you switch to these devices. Clicking that menu button will expand the nav menu. Clicking the button again collapses the nav menu.
On the Desktop breakpoint, you can see the nav links are nested inside the nav menu element. This nav menu is the same element that displays when the menu button is clicked — it displays the nav links in a vertical list.
You can open the nav menu in the Designer with the following steps:
The Navbar menu button initially appears in the Tablet breakpoint, but you can change this to make the button visible on all or no breakpoints:
Reusing your navbar on multiple pages can be handy when using a sticky navbar throughout your project. To make this easy, we’ll create a symbol of our navbar.
To create our navbar symbol:
Once you've created a symbol, the main mode of the symbol will open. All changes in the main mode will cascade across all instances of that symbol. You can enter main mode by double-clicking. See Editing the main symbol.
Now we can reuse the same navbar element anywhere in our project.
First, open the symbol panel, then click and drag the navbar symbol to any page in your project. Just like any element, you can drop the symbol directly on the canvas or in the Navigator for more precision.
When you select an instance of a symbol, you’ll see it highlighted and outlined in green. Click the Style panel to see how many instances of that symbol are in your project.
First, we want to make sure the navbar is a direct child of the body element. Why? Because we want it to stay on top when scrolling. The sticky position keeps the navbar in place until you scroll past it. But in this case, the navbar sticks to the top of the page while the remaining content scrolls away. And when you scroll back to the top of the page, the navbar will reposition itself.
Select the navbar and head to the Style panel. Set the position to sticky and set a top value of 0 to keep the navbar fixed to the top on scroll. And to make sure the navbar stays on top of all other content, add a high z-index value (e.g. 2147483647, which is the highest z-index value detected by most browsers).
Must know: Set a value on at least one side of the sticky element to make sure the sticky position works.
Position fixed removes the element from the document flow, so the navbar will float on the entire page and overlap other elements. We don’t want this to happen when the navbar is still in its initial position. We only want the navbar to stay fixed and floating above other elements when we’re scrolling.
On the other hand, position sticky keeps the element in the document flow and only sets it to position fixed when the element’s initial position is scrolled away. So, the navbar stays exactly where you’ve placed it without overlapping adjacent elements. When you start to scroll past, it becomes fixed to the viewport.
Sometimes position sticky won't work even though you've set the position to sticky and defined a distance value for one of the sides of the element. That can happen for many reasons:
Position sticky might not work if the position distance value is set on a side that isn't affected by the scrolling. For example, if you set the distance on the left or right, and you're scrolling through the page vertically, the element won't stick.
It also won’t work if you've set a distance to the bottom, for instance, instead of the top and your element is aligned to the top of the parent — it's either the first element in the parent or aligned to the top with flex or grid alignment settings.
A dropdown menu is a pre-built navigation element that can be added to almost any area of a project. Usually you’ll see a dropdown element in the navbar of a website.
From the Add panel on the right, you can drag the dropdown element to the desired location in your project.
The dropdown list isn't visible until the Dropdown is clicked. You can make it visible by going to the Settings tab and enabling the Open menu option.
By default, the dropdown list appears when a user clicks the dropdown toggle, but you can make it appear when the user hovers on the dropdown toggle by enabling the Open menu on hover option. The close delay time (the time it takes for the dropdown list to close after hovering away) can be adjusted in milliseconds.
And that’s creating a navbar with a dropdown menu. Nice work!
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