50 Examples of Drop-Down Navigation Menus in Web Designs
Having a clean and well-structured website navigation is key in designing an effective user interface. Drop-down menus are great for sites that have multiple levels of content hierarchy. The typical design pattern of a drop-down menu is that when a user hovers over the parent navigation item, a submenu of navigation items appears.
In this collection are many different types of drop-down menus used in websites all over the web for your navigation design inspiration.
Here are some related collections regarding site navigation that you may also be interested in:
- 30 Exceptional CSS Navigation Techniques
- 50 Stylish Navigation Menus for Design Inspiration
- 20 Excellent JavaScript Navigation Techniques and Examples
1. Pure Grips
Pure Grips feature images in their drop-down menu to make it clear to the user which products are which.
2. Porsche
As you hover over each car, the image on the right changes. It also looks stunning with the semitranspart background.
3. B&Q
B&Q has a clean and eye-catching drop-down menu that lists columns of products that customers are looking for.
4. Red Brick Health
This drop-down navigation menu fits perfectly into the site design, and the pink hover highlight is a great touch of detail.
5. Carreras Con Futuro
This drop-down menu’s design embodies the hand-drawn theme of the website.
6. Galaico Folia
This drop-down submenu has a wonderful animation effect with the smaller pieces of wood folding down from the main menu item.
7. Callaway Golf
This is a masterfully neat drop-down navigation design that has an orange hover effect.
8. Converse
Converse has a grunge-styled drop-down menu that has a cloth-like texture with frizzy edges.
9. Puma
This dark drop-down menu really stands out from the rest of the site’s lighter colours.
10. Sunglass Hut
This drop-down menu is functional in that it also serves as an illustrated visual of the various styles of sunglasses.
11. Nettuts+
Netttuts+ has a clean drop-down navigation menu that works well with their header colours.
12. Tennessee Trails & Byways
This drop-down is unique because within the submenu, there’s also tabbed navigation.
13. Gateway
The drop-down menu in this design has nice curves and beautiful visuals that serve to display images of the computer manufacturer’s products.
14. Bern
This rough grunge style website has an edgy drop-down menu that complement the look-and-feel of the website’s general aesthetics.
15. Ski Alpine
This drop-down menu highlights the attention to detail that the site designer has.
16. Guitar Hero
This simple drop-down menu is practical and doesn’t distract away from the main areas of the web page layout.
17. Mac Appstorm
Here’s a clean drop-down menu that fits perfectly with the overall landscape of the site design.
18. Noizi Kidz
This navigation is bright and shaped unconventionally.
19. Audi
This drop-down menu contains thumbnails of the auto maker’s model of cars; when you hover over a car, it displays details about it along with relevant links to other pages.
20. Famous Cookies
This drop-down navigation menu showcases the yummy cookies that the store makes available to its hungry patrons.
21. Duchy of Cornwall Nursery
This paper-styled website design has a nice, clean dropdown menu.
22. EA
Electronic Arts has a playfully styled drop-down menu.
23. Bonfire Snowboarding
Bonfire Snowboarding has an awesome 3-column drop-down submenu on their "Products" main navigation item, placing their products within three categories.
24. Facebook
Facebook has their simple drop-down menu on the site’s "Account" main menu link with relevant links for editing your Facebook account.
25. Nick Ad
You have to click-and-hold your mouse pointer for the submenu to appear. Then you move onto the link you want on each drop-down and release your mouse button to visit that page; it’s an interestingly unconventional interaction design.
26. TN Vacation
This dark blue drop-down menu really stands out.
27. MTV UK
This site design features a clean and standard drop-down menu.
28. DC Shoes
The red and white text on the semitransparent black background really works its charm.
29. Envato Marketplaces
This is a really beautiful drop-down menu.
30. Tennessee Theatre
This navigation is special because it’s clean but creative at the same time. The brown really stands out from the rest of the site’s soft colours.
31. Boden
Each menu item has a different font and the drop-down menu is very clean.
32. White House
The white background, blue text, and red top and bottom borders utilizes the the USA flag’s colours.
33. Navigant Consulting
The colours used on this site work together like players of a football team.
34. Officers Club
Another clothing website with a drop-down; having a dropdown submenu makes it so much easier to find products. The Officers Club drop-down has a multi-column layout.
35. Fall For Tennessee
Fall for Tennessee has a horizontal drop-down menu that slides out to the right hand side. The menu items that have a drop-down submenu have a small arrow next to them to indicate that they can be expanded.
36. Sony
Sony has a very wide and simple drop-down menu on their main UK site.
37. Project Vino
This drop-down menu uses colours that fit the rest of the site. The big font size and the overall design looks amazing.
38. Media Temple
Media Temple has by far one of the best drop-down menus out there, aesthetically. The small thumbnail of each hosting type next to the name of them looks great, along with excellent JavaScript-based animation transitions.
39. Mozilla
This is a simple yet sleek drop-down menu on the Mozilla.
40. August
The semitransparency effect in this drop-down menu works will with the vivid background image.
41. Henleys Clothing
The main navigation colour creeps down onto the drop-down submenu.
42. Digg
The classic Digg drop-down submenus work with their website’s overall design.
43. Action Envelope
This drop-down menu is special because it has a nice shadow effect that really brings the drop-down menu out of the page from the rest of the site.
44. Very
Very, a new e-store, has a clean and structured drop-down navigation menu.
45. Incase
The Incase drop-down menu is slightly lighter in color shade than the navigation background, and works well with the site’s overall clean look-and-feel.
46. American Eagle
I really like the American Eagle drop-down menu because it fills the whole site’s width and also blends in with the clean paper-style look.
47. Mayflower Brewing
The colours used in this drop-down (and the site, in general) are gorgeous.
48. Select Clothing
Select Clothing’s drop-down menu has a dark background that stands out over the sliding images below.
49. Bird Malaysia
This drop-down menu is special because the colours stand out from the rest of the website, and I quite like the subtle background image at the bottom of each drop-down menu.
50. The Web Squeeze
The Web Squeeze has implemented jQuery into their drop-down menu to give it some nifty hover effects.
Related Content
- 30 Exceptional CSS Navigation Techniques
- 50 Stylish Navigation Menus for Design Inspiration
- 20 Excellent JavaScript Navigation Techniques and Examples
- Related categories: Design Showcase / Inspiration and Web Design
About the Author
37 Comments
Nottingham
July 9th, 2010
Personally I’m not a massive fan of drop down menus, but this list gives some great examples of using them!
Dan
July 9th, 2010
From a design point of view these are great..
Pretty…
Interesting..
But generally I don’t like drop downs from a user point of view….
Nastya
July 9th, 2010
I liked the article! I live in central Europe and thanks to this site can monitor the work of designers all over the world!
Johnboy
July 9th, 2010
Just happen to be working on styling a drop down menu for a clients site as I came across this article, some gems in there, though a few are a bit unoriginal.
The icons on the sunglasses hut one especially caught my eye.
Jordan Walker
July 9th, 2010
Inspiring navigational menu’s wonder how many use SuckerFish?
Ted Thompson
July 9th, 2010
Some great examples, thanks for the inspiration!
Jennifer R
July 9th, 2010
Interesting! These drop down menu looks attractive alot and it will give more inspiration for web designers in their next project
Steve James
July 9th, 2010
Here’s a drop-down menu I like: http://grandsierraresort.com/
kris
July 9th, 2010
Andy, the link underneath N° 29 is wrong.
I like N° 47, Mayflower Brewing
It looks like transitions were used but I can’t find any.
Maybe I didn’t look hard enough.
I would like to know how this is done :-)
I wrote a tutorial about how to make a multilevel dropdown menu (no javascript), one that jumps up and to the side. I don’t think you can use it for your navigation so it’s a bit off topic here, but if there’s anyone interested, get in touch.
Osvaldas
July 9th, 2010
There’s a good solution for extra high drop-down menus what I didn’t find in the examples: http://www.adventistai.lt — see the right hand menu item.
Rodrigo Muniz
July 9th, 2010
Good to see great examples, but sad that not everyone are very good with accessibility.
J. Glerum
July 9th, 2010
This is a new nav we did that fits with this post – http://www.valitics.com. It uses some XML, preview images and text, and a few big, audacious images on a few hover overs too.
web&co
July 9th, 2010
have a look at the menu we built for http://www.alpenlachs.at/home
Cheers webco.at
ray
July 9th, 2010
http://www.heavy.com is a top cool drop menu
Alex Flueras
July 10th, 2010
Nice list. Here is another slick drop down mega menu: http://www.waterworks.com/
Eko Setiawan
July 10th, 2010
Thanks for share the inspirations…bookmarked!
Thomas Craig
July 10th, 2010
Andy, great examples of some exceptional work. Excellent source of inspiration.
Ann
July 10th, 2010
Very nice, but perhaps an idea for the next 50……..
horizontal drop-down menu that slides out to the right hand side?
Roman
July 10th, 2010
Another reference for me… nice!
Jacob Gube
July 10th, 2010
@Ann: Love the idea, I’ll see what I can do.
Rolf
July 10th, 2010
I like the Navigation of the Navigant Consulting-Design, its clear and nice :-)
ardianzzzz
July 10th, 2010
Nice, inspiring :)
BebopDesigner
July 10th, 2010
Great collection! love Media Temple and Nick Ad
Adam Hermsdorfer
July 11th, 2010
Nice! Descriptive mega menu’s are becoming more and more common. They are extremely useful and provide a cleaner description of what you are going to find in the category.
Ovanes
July 12th, 2010
I agree that drop downs are not the best in terms of usability, but in many scenarios you don’t have a choice.
I think that horizontal drop downs are much better. If they are so big and take up the whole screen I think drop downs are great.
ddeja
July 13th, 2010
Great collection. I’ll be trying to harvest them all for my own purposes:))))
Just love drop down navigation:)
Mark
July 14th, 2010
Thanks Andy,
This has given me some new ideas… I like the Audi drop-down, with thumbnails.
Now I need to learn how to do it :)
Off to check out your css navigation techniques.
Thanks again
osstudio
July 15th, 2010
Excellent list. Many new ideas emerged. thanks
Krivoy Rog
August 3rd, 2010
Media Temple – wery interesting!
Jenny Gore
November 18th, 2010
Some of these are fabulous – really professional! As they appear to be graphics… don’t they have an impact on SEO?
AcrylicWeb
November 23rd, 2010
What a great inspirational source!
Jeremy Mansfield
March 4th, 2011
We did this mega menu dropdown for Thomasville Furniture Industries back in August of 2009: http://www.thomasville.com
Jeffrey
April 18th, 2011
I would like to include one to the list I came across today:
http://www.optimumlightpath.com/.
They seem to have a very nicely designed and functioning navigation. I like the colors and how the tab goes above the bar. I also like the use of images instead of just using all typical links and how you can find anything you want through the nav.
aktivtek.no
June 16th, 2011
Hi guys. Very nice dropdown menus. I would be very happy to see a tutorial how to make them fast. Just have no patience to do the coding. Thanks for inspiration anyway. The first design – pure grips – is just awsome.
Mick
July 4th, 2011
The last one is my person favorite, drop downs are a little sketchy sometimes, especially if your audience is people who have difficulty with hand steadiness but the above just shows you that they can be done without issue and work well for most sites.
Mick.
sandeep
August 18th, 2011
Hii friends..I liked this dropdown menus.thanks for helped me.
Clare Brace
November 22nd, 2011
It’s really interesting to see how drop down nav’s have developed over time and can be so much more interesting and user friendly than a text list.
Cotswold outdoor should be on here there drop down menu is very extensive also.
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