50 Clean CSS menus

Tab navigation has been one of the most fundamental element in any modern web structure. In order to make sure visitors can properly navigate through the website. One of the biggest challenge web designers and developers faced is to integrate a simple and nice tab navigation that not only don’t confuse, but helps visitors easily understand where they should be clicking.

Whether you are running a website or blog, tab navigation is probably one of the element that helps drives traffic to internal pages. Here we’ve compiled a mass list of  50+ nice clean and sleek CSS Tab-Based navigation samples you can adapt on your site. Full list after jump.

If you are web designer / developer, you might be interested in these few articles we’ve previously done:

1. jQuery Coda-Slider

   
   Nice sleek tabs that slides through each tab.
   [demo]
   

2. Perspective Tabs

   
   Simple mootools plug-in that allows for a large number of tabs to fit into a small space.
   [demo]
   

3. jQuery idTabs

   
   
   It makes adding tabs into a website super simple. But it can also open the door to endless possiblities.
   [demo]
   

4. Tab Accordian

   
   Tab navigation with sleek animation using Moo FX.
   [demo]
   

5. DHTML Goodies Tab Panes

   
   Tab navigation with a close [x] button on each tab.
   [demo]
   

6. AJAX Tabs (Rails redux)

   
   Using Ajax to load information that does not need to be retrieved every time the user pulls the record.
   [demo]
   

7. Ajax Project – Tabbed Page Interface

   
   There are quite a few Javascript implementations of tabbed interfaces out there on the web. How much better, though, to be able to change from pagetab to pagetab without a page refresh? Here’s an example of a tabbed interface using Ajax to load the new pages.
   [demo]
   

8. JQuery Nested Tab Set

   
   Nested tab set done with the ExtJS UI Library.
   [demo]
   

9. Ajax Tab Reloaded

   
   Taken the idea of the sliding door tabs and mixed them up with a little javascript and ajax to make them very dynamic on the client side.
   [demo]
   

10. 14 Free Vertical CSS Menus

    
    Free nicely designed tabs from explodingboy.
    [demo]
    

11. Control.Tabs

    
    Control.Tabs attaches creates a tabbed interface from an unordered list of links/anchors that point to any elements on your page that have an id attribute.
    [demo]
    
    

12. JavaScript tabs with jQuery

    
    jQuery plugin that lets you create JavaScript tabs very easily. Examples of simple tabs, custom tabs, slide effects, fade effects and callbacks demos available.
    [demo]
    

13. Yahoo TabView

    
    Sample tabs based on Yahoo UI Library.
    [demo]
    

14. DHTML Ajax Tabs Content Script

    
    
    
    This is a versatile Ajax Tabs Content script that lets you display content pulled from external files inside a DIV and organized via CSS tabs. A fully unobtrusive, CSS and HTML based script, it supports practical features such as persistence of the active tab (ie: when page is reloaded), an "IFRAME" mode, a "slideshow" mode, ability to expand/contract arbitrary DIVs on the page at the same time, nested tabs, and much more.
    [demo]
    

15. JavaScript Tabifier

    
    Automatically create an HTML tab interface using plug-and-play JavaScript.
    [demo]
    

16. Tabtastic

    This library is a simple way to implement tabs on your page using CSS, a little JS, and semantic markup which degrades gracefully on browsers with CSS unavailable or disabled.
    [demo]
    
    

17. KollerMedia Tabmenu

    
    Tabs for images as icon, changes when mouseover.
    [demo]
    

18. dhtmlxTabber

    
    dhtmlxTabbar is a JavaScript tabbar control for creating dynamic tabbed-navigation interface. This Ajax-enabled UI component lets you add feature-rich and nice looking tabs to your site or web application.
    [demo]
    

19. Centered Tabs with CSS

    
    We’re constrained to either left- or right-hand navigation. But what if we need a bit more flexibility? What if we need to place our navigation in the center?
    [demo]
    

20. CSS Tab Designer

    
    [Windows only] CSS Tab Designer is a unique and easy to use software to help you design css-based lists and tabs visually and without any programming knowledge required!
    [demo]
    

21. Light Weight Low Tech CSS Tabs

    
    An example of light weight tabs by combining the Sliding Doors method with the Mountaintop corners idea.
    [demo 1, 2]
    

22. Module Tabs – Carousel

    
    Example of showing one page of content at at time in tabs. Each tab link scrolls to the page selected. Since all animation is turned off (animationSpeed = 0) then it just moves the desired content into view.
    [demo]
    

23. Joshua Kaufman’s CSS Tab 2.0

    
    Build CSS tabs without using any images or hacks and with as little CSS as possible.
    [demo]
    

24. Tabbed Navigation using CSS

    How to create low-bandwidth tab navigation on a web page using CSS.
    [demo]
    
    

25. Duoh’s 2nd Level Tab Menu

    
    [demo]
    

26. Nundroo CSS Navigation

    
    [demo]
    

27. CSS Menu With Slider

    
    This little example shows how to make really simple and yet very nice CSS Menu with slider.
    [demo]
    

28. CSS drop down menu

    
    Instead of the menu being triggered by placing your mouse of the menu label, it is trigger by moving your cursor over the down arrow on the right side of the menu label.
    [demo]
    

29. Fancy Menu

    
    Custom navigation bar with some cute Javascript effects that will certainly impress your friends.
    [demo]
    

30. Creative Pony Sliding Tab

    
    Sliding Tabs is a mootools 1.11 plugin which adds a pretty neat effect. It’s a clone of something seen on Panic Software’s Coda site.
    [demo]
    

31. JQuery Tab Animation

    
    A sample that show how you can add tab transition animations to your existing Tab Panel Controls.
    [demo]
    

32. Fancy Sliding Tab Menu

    
    Included an idle state listener to bring all the tabs back to their normal state after a desired amount of time without mouse movement on the window.
    [demo]
    

33. Sliding Door of CSS

    
    Now that CSS is widely supported, we can crank up the quality and appearance of the tabs on our sites.
    [demo]
    

34. Aplus ADxMenu

    
    4 most basic examples of tab submenus.
    

35. Bulletproof Slants

    
    [demo]
    

36. Core Design Magic Tabs

    
    Nice tab plugin for Joomla.
    [demo]
    

37. Brainjar Tabs

    
    Using CSS to build a tabbed display. One where the user can click on individual tabs to view different content within the same space.
    [demo]
    

38. qrayg CSS Menu

    
    4 level deep list in both horizontal and vertical layout modes while maintaining hover persistence.
    [demo]
    

39. Kalsey CSS Menu

    
    [demo]
    

40. Accessible Image-Tab Rollovers

    
    [demo]
    

41. HTML Dog CSS Tab

    
    A popular form of navigation is tabbed navigation-a group of links that give the impression of being protrusions attached to different areas of unseen content. With CSS you don’t need to be restricted to rigid images for every tab-you can maintain complete control over appearance and text at a fraction of the file size of image-only alternatives.
    [demo]
    

42. CSS Tabs Menu with Dropdowns

    
    Create dropdowns when the top level menu item is hovered over.
    [demo]
    

43. DOMTab

    
    DOMtab is a JavaScript that turns a list of links connected to content sections into a tab interface. The script removes any "back to top" links in the section and automatically hides all but the first one when the page is loaded.
    [demo]
    

44. Animated horizontal tabs

    
    These sliding doors based blue tinted tabs "jump up" when selected, such as when the mouse rolls over each one. This is accomplished using a combination of relative positioning and padding on each tab.
    [demo]
    

45. Inverted Shift Down Menu

    
    This clean CSS horizontal menu contains tabs with text that shift downwards slightly when the mouse rolls over it.
    [demo]
    

46. Inverted Shift Down Menu II

    
    [demo]
    

47. Vista Aero Buttons Menu

    
    This menu consists of a row of independent, Vista aero looking CSS buttons, and departs from the typical list based menu structure. Each button appears initially faded out slightly via CSS opacity, then brought back to full opacity during the "hover" state.
    [demo]
    

48. DD Tab Menus

    
    DD Tab Menu is a standards compliant, 2 level tab menu. Move your mouse over a tab, and a 2nd level content appears beneath it. The script uses CSS to control all of its appearance, and plain HTML to implement the entire menu tabs and contents.
    [demo]
    

49. EasyCFM DHTML Tab

    
    [demo]
    

50. Flexible Tab Navigation

    
    The navigation bar shown here is achieved via 3 images, a bit of CSS and some JavaScript.
    [demo]
    

51. jQuery UI/Tabs

    
    [demo]
    

52. jQuery Thickbox

    
    ThickBox is a webpage UI dialog widget written in JavaScript on top of the jQuery library. Its function is to show a single image, multiple images, inline content, iframed content, or content served through AJAX in a hybrid modal.
    [demo]