I've been working through Lisa's CSS tutorials, which have been very useful.

I've set up the horizontal navigation section and added 4 links. These work fine, but whenever the mouse is moved over or the link, all the links seem to move to the right slightly

I'm not really sure why

Here is my css for the section concerned

.navlinks{
position:absolute;
top:4px;
left:240px;
}

.navlinks ul {
margin: auto;
}

.navlinks li {
margin: 0px 15px 0px 15px;
list-style-type:none;
display:inline;
}

.navlinks li a {
color:#000000
padding: 5px 12px 5px;
text-decoration:none;
font-size:16px;
font-family:Verdana;
font-weight:bold;
}

.navlinks li a:hover{
color:#cc0000;
padding:5px 12px 5px;
font-size:16px;
font-family:Verdana;
font-weight:bold;
background-color:blue;
}

Any help would be greatly appreciated

You've missed a semicolon from the color property in .navlinks li a, so it's ignoring the padding. This means you'll get a big jump when it does recognise the padding in a:hover.

While I'm here, you have quite a bit of unnecessary code in the section you pasted. A lot of styling properties are inherited from their parents, so you don't need to repeat them. You could reduce the a:hover to

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Thanks Meloncholy for your comments.

Good eyesight too, to spot my mistake

I was working through Lisa's example trying to understand it as I went on, so the basic formatting is a direct copy of hers

However, when the words were moving, i thought maybe I had different fonts and sizes etc for the various links, so tried to make sure they were all in and the same. that's probably were any extra code came from

I eventually assumed it was something to do with the padding or margins, maybe after I had posted my question, so put everything to zero and it works.

Regards !