If you're running your own site, a lot of the time, you're the designer, the coder, the content manager, and the marketing guru. Doing all of these things can really take a lot of time, and building the menus on your site is probably the last thing you want to worry about. Most of the time, a text link "works", and so is good enough for what your viewers need (and no complaints about image-only links!). This new article from SitePoint might just be able to help you out in this department.

In this latest piece, Build Your Site Navigation With CSS, they show you how to take some of the simpler CSS functionality and make your links a bit more "pretty" to the general public. They recommend making a grid for each of the states for your menu links, showing what the color, effects, size, and border are for each before you start. They then move into showing you the actual CSS to create the samples they give, making it easier for you to see the end results.

Using simple things like this can make a site look tons better, even if it's just changing the default behavior of all of the anchor tags in your page...

(Oh, and while you're there check out their new layout...quite nice!)