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How to create a responsive and animated navbar using vanilla HTML, CSS, and js for beginners

How to create a responsive and animated navbar using vanilla HTML, CSS, and js for beginners

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Chirag Bhalotia
·

7 min read

Table of contents

Creating a responsive navbar without using any framework.

The goal of a Responsive web design is about making web pages look good on all devices.

A responsive web design will automatically adjust or adapt to different screen sizes and viewports.

But a major issue in today's developers is that many of the new developers are fully dependent on frameworks like bootstrap and don't even know how to implement it without using any framework

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Complete source code here

Note: If you already know how to set up fonts and set up the files then you can skip to the navbar part

Steps:

1. Setup the HTML, CSS, js files and icons images :-

We will create an index.html file in the root directory of our project folder and write the boilerplate code.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>Document</title>
</head>
<body>

</body>
</html>

Now we will create a styles.css file in our css folder and an index.js file in our js folder and link it to our index.html file.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
        <meta charset="UTF-8" />
        <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
        <title>Document</title>


        <!-- stylesheets -->
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="./css/styles.css" />
    </head>
    <body>
        <script src="./js/index.js"></script>
    </body>
</html>

In the end you can add the icons in the assets folder Icon 1
Icon 2

Complete folder structure till now

Screenshot from 2022-05-22 01-15-01.png

2. Write some basic CSS

Now we will write some CSS code to reset some default properties

* {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    box-sizing: border-box;
}

a {
    color: inherit;
    text-transform: inherit;
    text-decoration: inherit;
}

li {
    list-style: none;
}
button {
    outline: none;
    border: none;
    background-color: inherit;
}
body {
    width: 100vw;
    overflow-x: hidden;
}

3. Add a custom font

Now we will import a custom font using google fonts for our navbar For this navbar I am going to use the Poppins font

We will start by selecting all the font styles we want and then we will open the selected families dashboard by clicking on the "view selected families" button on the top right of the page. (Note: For most of you the dashboard will be opened from the beginning)

image.png

image.png

Now we will copy the link from the dashboard and paste it into the head tag in the index.html file.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
        <meta charset="UTF-8" />
        <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
        <title>Document</title>

        <!-- google fonts -->
        <link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com" />
        <link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin />
        <link
            href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Poppins:ital,wght@0,100;0,200;0,300;0,400;0,500;0,600;0,700;0,800;0,900;1,200;1,300;1,400;1,500&display=swap"
            rel="stylesheet"
        />


        <!-- stylesheets -->
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="./css/styles.css" />
    </head>
    <body>
        <script src="./js/index.js"></script>
    </body>
</html>

and finally, we will specify the font family we want to use in our styles.css file by adding the following line

font-family: "Poppins", sans-serif;

Note: this line can be copied from the google fonts page from the selected families dashboard.

image.png

Our final CSS code

* {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    box-sizing: border-box;
}

a {
    color: inherit;
    text-transform: inherit;
    text-decoration: inherit;
}

li {
    list-style: none;
}
button {
    outline: none;
    border: none;
    background-color: inherit;
}
body {
    width: 100vw;
    overflow-x: hidden;
    font-family: "Poppins", sans-serif;
}

Now we can get started with the navbar.

4. Write the HTML code for the navbar

First, we will add all the elements of the dashboard in the index.html file and give them appropriate classes

<body>
        <nav class="navbar">
            <div class="container">
                <div class="logo">
                    <a href="https://chirag.codes">
                        <img src="./assets/img/logo.svg" alt="logo" />
                        <span>Chirag</span>
                    </a>
                </div>
                <ul class="nav-items">
                    <li class="nav-item"><a>About</a></li>
                    <li class="nav-item"><a>Pricing</a></li>
                    <li class="nav-item"><a>Features</a></li>
                </ul>
            </div>
        </nav>
        <script src="./js/index.js"></script>
    </body>

5. Write CSS code for the navbar

we will start by writing CSS code for the .navbar class

.navbar {
    width: 100%;
    padding: 10px 10%;
    background-color: aliceblue;
    position: relative;
}

There is a reason we are giving the position relative to the navbar which we will see when we are making the navbar responsive for mobile designs

Now the .container class

.container {
    display: flex;
    justify-content: space-between;
    align-items: center;
    width: 100%;
}

Now for the logo and brand name

.logo a {
    font-weight: bold;
    display: flex;
    justify-content: center;
    align-items: center;
    font-size: 1.4rem;
}
.logo img {
    max-height: 40px;
    margin-right: 5px;
}

.nav-items and .nav-item


.nav-items {
    display: flex;
    justify-content: center;
    align-items: center;
    margin-left: auto;
}
.nav-item {
    margin: 10px;
    font-size: 1.2rem;
}
.nav-item a {
    cursor: pointer;
}

The current condition of our navbar

image.png

Next We will add a menu to our Features .list-item something like this

image.png

6. Adding Html for the menu

We will just add a .nav-list class to the nav-item in which the menu has to be added. and one more list of items for the menu with the nav-list-items inside the .nav-item

<li class="nav-item nav-list">
       <a>Features</a>
      <ul class="nav-list-items">
            <li>
                      <a href="#"> Fast Delivery </a>
            </li>
            <li>
                     <a href="#"> Best Quality </a>
            </li>
            <li>
                   <a href="#"> Customer Service </a>
            </li>
     </ul>
</li>

7. Adding CSS for the menu

We cannot position the .nav-item-lists using margin and padding so we will have to use position: absolute in .nav-list-items and we have to make sure that its position and size is relative to the .nav-list in which it is present so we will add a position: relative to .nav-list

More about position

.nav-list {
    position: relative;
    cursor: pointer;
}
.nav-list-items {
    z-index: 100;
    position: absolute;
    width: max-content;
    padding: 15px 20px;
    background: white;
    border-radius: 10px;
    top: 100%;
    box-shadow: 0px 0px 5px 1px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1);
}
.nav-list-items li {
    margin: 5px;
}

We have to make sure that the menu is only displayed when the cursor is hovered over .nav-list. So we will add a display: none to .nav-list-items and and a hover effect to .nav-list:hover .nav-list-items like this 


.nav-list-items {
    z-index: 100;
    position: absolute;
    width: max-content;
    padding: 15px 20px;
    background: white;
    border-radius: 10px;
    top: 100%;
    box-shadow: 0px 0px 5px 1px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1);
    display: none;
}
.nav-list:hover .nav-list-items {
    display: block;
}

menu.gif

8. Adding animation to our menu

Now let's add some animation to the menu

For that, we will first add keyframes in our css and add it to our .nav-list:hover .nav-list-items

.nav-list:hover .nav-list-items {
    animation: nav-list-animation 1s;
    display: block;
}

@keyframes nav-list-animation {
    0% {
        opacity: 0;
        transform: translateY(5px);
    }

    100% {
        opacity: 1;
        transform: translateY(0);
    }
}

keyframes are used to define CSS values during a time period in the animation

More about keyframes here

Result:

This added a nice smooth animation to our menu. menu-animated.gif

9. Making the navbar responsive

We will start by adding a .toggle-button in the html just after our .nav-items

               <ul class="nav-items">
                    <li class="nav-item"><a>About</a></li>
                    ...
                </ul>
                <div class="toggle-button">
                    <button>
                        <img src="./assets/img/menu.svg" alt="menu" />
                    </button>
                </div>

Next we will add the css for the button

we don't want it to display on large screens so we will add a display: none to the .toggle-button

.toggle-button {
    display: none;
    height: 40px;
}
.toggle-button button {
    height: 100%;
    padding: 5px;
}
.toggle-button img {
    max-height: 100%;
}

Now to actually make navbar responsive we will use media queries to define different css code for different screen width

So, we will define the following media query

@media screen and (max-width: 600px){}

This media query just means that every css code written inside is only applicable for devices with screen width less than 600px;

Note: Every CSS code written inside a media query is given more importance than the CSS code written outside the media query

Next we will add the necessary css code inside the media query.

@media screen and (max-width: 600px) {
    .toggle-button {
        display: block;
    }
    .nav-items {
        display: none;
        position: absolute;
        width: 100%;
        top: 100%;
        left: 0;
        flex-direction: column;
        background-color: aliceblue;
        align-items: baseline;
        padding: 10px 10%;
    }
    .nav-items-active {
        display: block;
    }
}

Again we can't position the nav-items using margin and padding so we will use position: absolute and this time it will be relative to the .navbar as we added position: relative to it in step 5

And we don't want it to display until the toggle button is clicked so we will add a display: none to it and then define one more class .nav-items-active with display: block which we will use to change the state of our nav-items

Now how do we add the class .nav-items-active and remove it on every click on the toggle button?

For that we will use javascript

So let's open our index.js and write the following code

const navList = document.querySelector(".nav-items");
const toggleButton = document.querySelector(".toggle-button");

toggleButton.addEventListener("click", function () {
    if (navList.className.includes("nav-items-active"))
        navList.classList.remove("nav-items-active");
    else navList.classList.add("nav-items-active");
});

This adds an event listener to our toggle button and adds the class .nav-items-active to .nav-items if it is not present otherwise removes it.

That's it for our navbar, See you later

image.png

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