Styling a Blog`s Links Bar with CSS Sprites

If you really want to provide users of your web site with a more pleasant surfing experience when moving between its different sections, then you should consider building the site's main navigation bar using CSS sprites. This handy technique, when employed in conjunction with a well-trusted image replacement method, permits you to create image-based interfaces that are not only attractive to human eyes, but highly responsive as well. In summary, you get the best of both worlds.

If all of these advantages aren't enough for you, let me tell you that implementing CSS sprites on web pages is a straightforward process that doesn't require any special skills or even a complete background in the most obscure parts of the CSS specification. What's more, if you're familiar with the basic features of your favorite image editor and know how to use CSS to display background graphics, then you should be glad, because you're on the right path.

Surely, if you've been a loyal follower of this series and have already read all of the tutorials that precede this one, then you now know how to take advantage of the functionality offered by CSS sprites for building eye-catching navigational bars. In those articles I used code samples to demonstrate how to accomplish this in a fairly easy way.

Speaking more specifically, in the previous part I started developing the landing page of a fictional blog site, which will include a navigation bar whose corresponding sections will be decorated using a brand new set of CSS sprites. So far, it's fair to say that the page looks incomplete, as the only area that has been properly styled is its header. Nonetheless, this is about to change, since in the following lines I'll be creating a background image to define the visual presentation of the different states of the bar.

Now, it's time to discover the real power behind using CSS sprites. Let's jump in!