This is the second tutorial in the “Workshop for the Absolute Beginner Web Programmer” series and is targeted at the very novice web designer or a web developer. In this workshop we are extending the things we have learned in the first workshop and we are targeting to build a vertical menu system built out of pure XHTML markup CSS styling. As we have learned in the first workshop we are keeping the markup for the menu in a separate PHP file and include it in to your main website for ease of maintenance. 

So lets create a CSS styled vertical menu.

Our vertical menu will be developed by taking care of the below given objectives.
1.    The vertical menu uses text for the menu labels instead of any images.
2.    The menu should indicate the current page in which it is being shown. For this we will be using a simple marker image to indicate the current page.
3.    The menu items should have some sort of mouse hover indicator to show the user that they are navigation elements.

4.    The menu should be placed in a separate file for easily maintaining any future changes to the menu structure.