Dissecting the Green Key Marquee
The recent redesign of professional recruiter and temporary staffing firm features an interactive marquee that combines a slideshow, areas of expertise menu kick-out, and zoomable touts highlighting the site’s three key areas: available positions, resume submission and employers portal. This is a dissection of the component’s front-end HTML and CSS architecture, giving a more in-depth look at what’s actually happening under the hood.
The Marquee Frame
The marquee’s frame consists of the following divs:
#marquee– main parent container#marquee_head– transparent png set as the background for the top curve#marquee_foot– transparent png set as the background for the bottom curve#marquee_content– content with a repeating vertical shadow background image#marquee_overflow– wrapping container withoverflowset to hidden to clip excess content from appears outisde the curves and sides
Each of the background images have a white outset to allow for the clipping to display correctly.
Zoomable Touts
Keepin’ it cross-browser
The challenge here was keeping the tout’s markup within the actual marquee parent container to maintain a nice markup flow. Since IE disallows childen to stack over its parent elements who have an overflow set to hidden, this presented a problem for the hover states on each tout. As seen in the image, the touts overlay the actual marquee frame when hovered over with a cursor.
The solution?
Gotta swallow the geek pride on this one. We have to break the markup’s natural flow a bit and place the hover states, #marquee_touts_active, outside the #marquee div. Fortunately the placement is immediately after the #marquee div so the markup’s “roadmap” is still intact.
Transparency
No png’s necessary. The tout’s transparency setting is fully CSS-controlled. To cover all bases a few separate browser-specific CSS statements are necessary (see below).
Areas of Expertise Menu
This menu is an overlay kick-out that appears when you hover over its call to action underneath the marquee’s main blurb that lists areas of expertise which are specific to the current division you are viewing.
See for Yourself
Below are stripped down versions of the actual HTML and CSS. You can view the marquee live in action at any of Green Key’s divisional sites such as Accounting & Finance.
HTML
<!-- #marquee-->
<div id="marquee">
<!-- #marquee_head -->
<div id="marquee_head">Beginning of Marquee</div>
<!-- /#marquee_head -->
<!-- #marquee_content -->
<div id="marquee_content">
<!-- #marquee_overflow -->
<div id="marquee_overflow">
<!--.slide -->
<div class="slide">
<!-- slide content -->
</div>
<!-- /.slide -->
<!-- #marquee_touts -->
<div class="clear" id="marquee_touts">
<div class="tout">
<!-- tout content -->
</div>
</div>
<!-- /#marquee_touts -->
<!-- #menu_areas -->
<div id="menu_areas">
<!-- areas of expertise content -->
</div>
<!-- /#menu_areas -->
</div>
<!-- /#marquee_overflow -->
</div>
<!-- /#marquee_content -->
<!-- #marquee_foot -->
<div id="marquee_foot">End of Marquee</div>
<!-- /#marquee_foot -->
</div>
<!-- /#marquee -->
<!-- #marquee_touts_active-->
<div class="clear" id="marquee_touts_active">
<div class="tout"><!-- tout content --></div>
</div>
<!-- /#marquee_touts_active -->
CSS:
/* #marquee
---------------------------------------------------------------*/
#marquee {
margin:0 0 0 -10px;
width:961px;
}
#marquee #marquee_head {
background: url(/img/bg/bg_marquee_head.png)
no-repeat scroll 0 0;
_filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.
AlphaImageLoader(
src='/img/bg/bg_marquee_head.png',
sizingMethod='image'
);
_background: none;
height:43px;
position:relative;
text-indent:-1000em;
width:961px;
z-index:2;
}
#marquee #marquee_foot {
background: url(/img/bg/bg_marquee_foot.png) no-repeat;
_filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.
AlphaImageLoader(
src='/img/bg/bg_marquee_foot.png',
sizingMethod='image'
);
_background: none;
height: 60px;
width: 961px;
position: relative;
z-index: 5;
text-indent: -1000em;
}
#marquee #marquee_content {
background: url(/img/bg/bg_marquee_content.png)
repeat-y scroll 0 0;
height:391px;
position:relative;
}
#marquee #marquee_content #marquee_overflow {
height:446px;
margin:-25px 0 0 10px;
overflow:hidden;
position:absolute;
width:940px;
}
/* #marquee_touts
---------------------------------------------------------------*/
#marquee_touts {
position: absolute;
top: 450px;
z-index: 1;
background: #236336;
filter:alpha(opacity=85);
-moz-opacity:0.85;
-khtml-opacity: 0.85;
opacity: 0.85;
}
#marquee_touts .tout {
float: left;
width: 311px;
padding: 23px 0 45px 0;
border-right: 1px solid #77917e;
cursor: default;
height: 50px;
}
/* #marquee_touts_active
---------------------------------------------------------------*/
#marquee_touts_active {
position: absolute;
z-index: 100;
margin: -165px 0 0 0;
}
#marquee_touts_active .tout {
height: 153px;
position: absolute;
}
#marquee_touts_active .tout .tout_content {
height: 153px;
}
/* extra div for ie hasLayout */
#marquee_touts_active .tout .tout_content {
padding: 30px 0 0 0;
background-position: left top;
background-repeat: no-repeat;
}
/* #menu_areas
---------------------------------------------------------------*/
#menu_areas {
position: absolute;
z-index: 2;
top: 235px;
left: 34px;
padding: 33px 0 0 0;
width: 578px;
}
#menu_areas.active {
background: url(/img/bg/bg_menu_areas_head.png)
no-repeat left top;
_filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.
AlphaImageLoader(
src='/img/bg/bg_menu_areas_head.png',
sizingMethod='crop'
);
_background: none;
}
#menu_areas.active .menu_content { display: block; }