Basic WordPress training: Creating a custom menu
In this tutorial we’ll take a look at using the WordPress menu feature to create menus for your website.
WordPress menus are a way building a consistent site-wide navigation, they highlight the most important content on the site (usually pages rather than posts), and they help visitors identify and go to what it is they are looking for.
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Where are menus found?
The location of menus is controlled by your WordPress theme. Normally the main menu is along the top of every page in a horizontal layout, or down the left-hand side of every page in a vertical lay-out. Some themes support more than one menu.
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How to create a menu
The 3 basic steps in building a menu for your site are:
- Create the menu
- Add links to the menu
- Position the menu
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First of all, go to Appearance>Menu.
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You are then taken to a menu-building page.
Click on ‘Create a New Menu’ and enter a ‘Menu Name’ (this is just an identifier for you – your site visitors won’t see this name). Then click ‘Create Menu’.
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Next you’ll see some options. You can choose to automatically add pages to the menu as you create them if you so wish. I would personally leave this unchecked so you have greater control over what appears in your menu.
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Adding links to the menu
So now you need to add the links to the menu. There are a couple of ways to do this. The first is the most straightforward. The the left of the screen you’ll see a list of your pages. You can simply check the pages you’d like to appear as links in the menu and click ‘Add to Menu’.
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You can edit the way the link is displayed by clicking on the downwards arrow next to any item in the menu. For example, if you wanted your ‘Contact’ page link to read ‘Get in touch’, you’d change the label here.
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You can also drag the menu items into the order you’d like them to appear.
If you’d like a link to content that isn’t a page on your site, you have some more options. To link to a blog post or an external page, click on ‘Links’, enter the URL of the page you want to appear in the menu and specify the link text (the label as it should appear on the menu).
Then click on ‘Add to menu’.
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You can also select Category archive pages to link to in the menu by clicking on ‘Categories’, checking the categories you’d like to appear in the menu and clicking ‘Add to menu’.
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If you’d like items to appear in a drop down menu which appears when you click on a main menu item, simply drag the menu items to the right slightly to indent them and they will be become sub-items.
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Once you are happy with your menu, click ‘Save menu’.
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We now need to specify where the menu we’ve just created should appear on the site. To do this click on ‘Manage Locations’.
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The theme we use at TextileArtist.org has three menu locations available. I want the menu I just created to appear as my main navigation, so I’ll find it in the drop-down menu next to ‘Main Navigation’ and select it. Then I’ll click ‘Save Changes’.
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Now if I navigate to the homepage of my site, I see the menu I just created.
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