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As you may know already, EverWeb Garden is a new third party provider of EverWeb widgets. To launch their site, EverWeb Garden offered EverWeb users their initial batch of over 60 widgets for free. This offer has now been extended for a limited time! If you missed out the first time round, you now have another chance to get an assortment of dynamic, professionally designed third party widgets absolutely free.

One type of widget that is always in demand is website navigation widgets, so in this post we will be reviewing six EverWeb Garden navigation widgets. All the widgets reviewed below can be used on either fixed width (centered or left aligned) page layouts or in a responsive page layout unless otherwise stated.

Fading Navigation Bar Widget

The Fading Navigation Bar widget is a simple widget that can change its colors as you scroll down the page. This adds an interesting way to keep the navigation menu prominent when your visitor scrolls the page. The effect can be applied to both simple and hamburger style navigation menus. When using the Hamburger menu option, the dropdown menu items are displayed in the center of the page with an ‘X’ to close the navigation in the top right hand corner. It is a nice, clean look for your navigation.

In addition, you can add your own logo to the navigation as well as a button which has the option to change its own color as you scroll the page. The button can be used in both simple and hamburger style navigation menus. A button can be useful as a ‘Call To Action’ highlighting e.g. special offers or limited time online sales etc. to your site’s visitors.

Fading Navigation Bar Pro Widget

The second widget in this review is the ‘Pro’ version of the Fading Navigation Bar widget. As with the regular version of the widget, simply add the pages that you want to the navigation using the ‘Add’ button. In the Pro version of the widget you can add dropdown menu items to the navigation. You can add any page in your site to any dropdown menu. The Dropdown menu feature also has its own styling options so that you can create exactly the look that you want to match with your website’s design.

Slide Out Navigation Widget

The Slide Out Navigation widget is a popular style of navigation seen in many websites as it offers a clear and simple menu style that slides out only when activated. This feature helps keeps your page design clean and simple in appearance.

The widget works in a simple way. Just drag and drop it on to the page and you will see a ‘Hamburger’ icon displayed. You can change the color of the hamburger itself, its background and the font size and style that the navigation uses. The width of the navigation can also be adjusted as desired.

You can add your own logo to the top of the slide out menu and adjust its sizes required. The navigation can slide out from either the left or right side of the screen and the navigation’s text can be left, right or center aligned. The smooth fly out animation effect adds a nice quality element to the widget.

In addition to the above mentioned options, you can add a button to the bottom of the slide out menu. This is great for when you want to highlight, for example, links to ‘terms and conditions’ pages, sales pages and so on. As you would expect, the button itself is fully customizable so you can match it up perfectly to your site’s own design style.

Mobile Menu Widget

The Mobile Menu widget is a variation on the Slide Out Navigation widget, however, this widget allows you to link to pages within your project file, to external pages and even to file types such as PDF files. The Hamburger icon can be customized including its size which can be adjusted just by dragging the icon’s grab handles or by using the Metrics Inspector.

This Mobile Menu Widget has many options available to it such as how you want the navigation to be displayed: as a dropdown, slide overlay, slide push or as a popup. You can even add a search field to you navigation menu!

Navigation Bar with Icons Widget

The Navigation Bar with Icons widget give you a really nice way to create menus that look like, for example, EverWeb’s Toolbar. The widget includes eight built in icons or you can use icons from Font Awesome which has plenty of free to use icons to choose from! You can customize the widget’s text fonts, set top and bottom margins and even the maximum width of the navigation. The Navigation Bar with Icons Widget is a simple, but really effective navigation combining text and icons!

Hidden Navigation Bar Widget

The final widget in this review is the Hidden Navigation Bar Widget. This is a fixed widget that hides itself once you scroll down to a predefined location on the page. As with some of the aforementioned widgets, you can also add a button to the navigation menu and there is full customization available for the navigation as you would expect.

EverWeb Garden’s navigation menu widgets provide a great way to add modern styles and variety to your website’s navigation. The full range of third party EverWeb Garden widgets is still available for free for a limited time only on their website. If you have any questions about these, or any other widget provided by EverWeb Garden, please contact them directly via their website.

EverWeb on Social Media

You can also find EverWeb on the following social media platforms:

Facebook

Flipboard

YouTube

Twitter

Instagram

September is usually the month where many people return to work after the holidays. Schools also restart and you’ll see EverWeb’s presence there too! Check out the section ‘EverWeb in Education’ below or our FaceBook page…

Also in the news, MacWorld has chosen EverWeb as the ‘Top Choice for Everyone’ in it’s Website builder review. This, and more, to enjoy in this month’s Highlights post below…

In the News

EverWeb garnered great reviews from MacWorld this month, gaining the accolade “Top Choice for Everyone”. Checkout the review at

http://www.macworld.com/article/2984967/software-web/web-design-review-roundup-our-favorite-mac-apps-for-building-a-website.html

or take a look over on our FaceBook page.

EverWeb in Education

Still on EverWeb’s Facebook page, you can see how EverWeb is being used by educational institutes.

“EverWeb is being taught in middle schools, high schools, and universities all over the globe! This includes educational institutions such as Butler, and Carson-Newman Universities, as well as Lyceum of Finance and Law in Kiev who sent in this very nice ‘Thank You’ photo.” which you can see at…

https://www.facebook.com/everwebapp

And don’t forget that if you are interested in teaching EverWeb in your school, please get in touch with us and we will let you know how to obtain a free license for educational institutions.

Product News

EverWeb 1.9 beta testing continued in September. Thanks for your feedback on the beta test version, which as always, is invaluable in helping us make the best product we can!

RAGE Support and Admin Site Updated

At the end of the month, RAGE Software’s www.billing.ragesw.com site was updated with a new look and feel that should make account and domain hosting administration easier and simpler than ever. The Discussion Forums have also been updated with the same look and feel.

Blogs You May Have Missed

You can catch up with our Blog’s that contain useful information, how to’s and advanced tutorials at www.ragesw.com/blog

EverWeb highlights:  August 2015

All You Need to Know About EverWeb Master Pages

EverWeb’s Navigation Menu Widget Part I: Adding a Menu

EverWeb’s Navigation Menu Widget Part II: Styling Options

EverWeb Tutorials

Checkout our YouTube channel for many great video tutorials that explain how to get the best our of EverWeb’s new and existing features. There are also tutorials in the Resources section of the EverWeb website to explore.

EverWeb on Flipboard and Google+

Our Flipboard magazine has been updated to include all the latest news and blogs on EverWeb… and don’t forget we are also on Google+ so remember to add RAGE Software to your Google+ Circles to keep up to date.

More to Explore…

There’s a lot of information on EverWeb on the Internet. To keep up with the latest news, features, tutorials, blogs and developments find us on

Facebook

Google+

Flipboard

YouTube

Or leave a comment below if you have any questions or want to know more…

Google translate has been updated with some very cool new features. These new features include;

1. Instant Translation of Text
You no longer need to press the translate button. Google translate will now translate your text on the fly as you type.

2. Read and write in an langauge
Google translate can now teach you how to pronounce words by converting non-roman characters to english sounding words. In addition, you can even type words as they sound in English and Google can convert them to proper words in languages such as Arabic, Persian or Hindi.

3. Text to speech
Lastly with Google Translate you can now hear translations spoken to you.

All these new features to Google translate are definitely worth checking out.

Google is working on their next generation search engine algorithm, known as the “Caffeine update”, and is giving everyone the opportunity to test it out.

Although you won’t see any interface changes, the new infrastructure attempts to offer faster indexing of websites, a larger search database and better search results. You can see where your website is ranking in the new index by going to their temporary search page.

Right now Google is looking for feedback about the results you get for your search term. You can submit feedback by doing a search then scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking the dissatisfied with search results link.

Although Google claims that the update is not because of any new search engine rivals, such as Microsoft’s new Bing engine, some may find many reasons to doubt that.

With the release of Bing, Microsoft is putting the pressure on Google to continually update their products and services. Maybe now with a suitable competitor, Google may need to cut their beta periods on new products by a couple of years and start introducing new features at a faster pace.

Mac360 praises Domainer’s ability to track and manage your domain names and web sites.

Here is what Mac360 had to say about Domainer;

Managing domains and sites requires a special effort. Domainer is the tool that makes it easy, fun, timely, and efficient.

In typical Mac utility fashion, Domainer makes the complex simple to manage. Domain names can be entered into Domainer and tracked via creation date and expiration date.

Thanks Mac360 for the great software review!

About Mac360
Mac360 is a great resource to get high quality software reviews, updates on what’s going on in the Mac community and talk Mac on the Mac360 discussion forums.

RAGE Domainer was reviewed on episode #130 on MacReviewCast.com.

“[Domainer], aimed at webmasters, provides a great way to see information about all of your domains all from within one interface. The UI is intuitive and extremely easy to use … The app shows various page ranking statistics as well as some basic stats about incoming links. This makes it useful if you want to quickly check performance of multiple domains.”

Check out MacReviewCast.com for more great software reviews, software discounts and the latest in Mac news.