This is post #15 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101. Subscribe now so you don’t miss future posts.
Previously we setup some Pages to contain static content on our website. These were automatically added to the sites menu system, making navigation easy. That’s nice, but there isn’t a lot of control over the menu layout in this default mode. So, let’s take a look at the Menus option in WordPress.
WordPress Menus
WordPress menus allow great flexibility over your site’s menu system. Working in concert with your selected theme, the menus feature allows you to customize a lot of little details. And that’s important. Making your site navigation easy and intuitive is critical to a good design.
A simple example will start to make the power of the menu system, and WordPress, clear. The beauty of this bloggy sort of website platform is flexibility, a lot of which can be leveraged via the Categories and Tags feature we looked at previously. As we saw then, Categories and Tags are convenient ways to organize your site content. In addition to tag clouds and category lists, this flexibility can be surfaced directly on the menu system.
Setting up a menu
Let’s say the pet shop website we’ve been working on as an example wants to feature a How To section as an option off of the main menu navigation. By activating the Menus feature, we can accomplish this seamlessly.
To get started, click on Menus on the navigation pane of the WordPress Dashboard. Give your menu a name and click “Create Menu.”
Then, select that menu as your primary navigation.
Now, your automatically generated menu based on the Pages you created are gone. So let’s put them back.
Click on all the pages in the Pages box and click “Add to Menu.”
Notice that the items on your new menu can easily be re-arranged by dragging and dropping. Let’s change the order around a bit to make it flow more logically.
Now for the fun part. Let’s add the How To category as a menu item. Simply select it from the Categories list and click “Add to Menu.”
Once again, we can arrange the menu system by dragging and dropping. Let’s put the new How To option as the second to last choice.
After saving all those changes, we can see that the layout on the live website is just as we set it. Clicking on a menu items that point to a page brings up that page. Clicking on the How To menu selection brings up all posts that are in the How To category. This makes your content automatically appear where it is supposed to on the menu system simply by categorizing it properly.
Keep ‘em separated
Separating content from format is an important premise in making your website work well. As we saw previously with themes, the design, layout, and look and feel of your website can easily be modified without impacting the content. With menus, the navigation of your site (when planned out thoughtfully) can be automatically maintained – even for posts that fall into multiple categories. The possibilities are extensive.
This is post #15 in my Website 101 series; all posts in this series are tagged website101. Subscribe now so you don’t miss future posts.