Users have been asking for layouts with horizontal navigation. They are now available experimentally in a preview of Version 2.4 installed recently. Horizontal navigation can be placed in the header and/or footer of your site.

Variations include (a) a horizontal menu near the top, with the same variety of visual control that has long been available in the traditional Table of Contents (now called main menu; (b) a text-only footer menu; and (c) a user-specified combination of top, side and footer menus.

Since the space available across a page is smaller than the vertical main menu, we advise that only sites with few primary links should use the horizontal top menu.

The best way to experiment with this new option is to create an alternative theme based on one of the new horizontal system themes. As always, Sitemaker's system themes take a minimalist approach, leaving the editor free to choose graphics, colors, etc., without undue influence from the Sitemaker Team. After all, it's your site. So create your new theme, play with it, and when it's ready, substitute it.

The link below shows this site simplified with the home, blog and calendar. Note the content of the selected pages is exactly the same in both layouts. (In actual use one might well change the column widths on the home page. Luckily with Sitemaker that's easy. Clearly some design decisions work better across themes than others; as problems go, that's a good one to have.)

Example