Sharepoint and its template/master pages

I'm trying to learn how to customize a sharepoint site. I've seen a lot of examples and they all seem to have one thing in common, the navigation are all the same. Ie the left nav开发者_StackOverflow with the different pages and docs. top nav with mostly links to sub-sites or other sites.

Does anyone know of a good tutorial or example i can grab that has a horizontal layout of the left nav? i haven't found any.

You need to set properties on the aspmenu control in the master page. Aside from the data source it's just a standard asp.net menu.

If you need complete control, look into the css friendly control adapters - that will let you render an aspmenu (used by sharepoint for both top and left nav) as an unordered list and apply whatever css you need. If you are using SharePoint 2010 you can get the same effect with the SimpleRendering property.

First See here to customize the Display of Quick Launch
and here to Add fly-out menus to SharePoint navigation. For Horizonal layout, Change Orientation="Vertical" to "Horizontal" in SharePoint:AspMenu.

See following to customize the site
http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2009/01/28/customizing-a-sharepoint-site/