Zip has been uncharacteristically motivated, so we’ve been pumping out the posts in the last couple of days to get to the frustrating-but-fun stuff: design. But an important part of the Appearance items in WordPress are menus. This post will go over adding menus in WordPress.
By default, Slothverse.com had a “default” menu — new pages would show up automatically in the header. But we want to be more intentional. Having a good menu is an important way for visitors to be able to find content on your website. Fortunately, WordPress menus are drag-and-drop and easy to use (I recall way back when they weren’t so intuitive.) Make sure you consider how you’re arranging your content. Think as if you’re a visitor to your own website.
Just like when we added widgets, you can access menus either from the customizer or from Appearance>Menus. You can also hover over your website’s name in the admin bar from the front end of the website and then choose “Menus.” And, just like with widgets, I normally add menus from admin, not from the customizer unless I am making design changes.
How to Add a Menu in WordPress
Time needed: 10 minutes.
Adding a Menu in WordPress
- Go to Menus
Either navigate to Appearance>Menus in WordPress admin or access Menus from the WordPress customizer. Alternately, you can access it from hovering over your website’s name in the admin bar from the front of your website and choose “menus”
- Click Create a New Menu at the Top
- Name Your Menu and (Optionally) Choose Where it Will Appear
Give your new menu a name and check a box if you want it to appear in one of the locations offered. You can also set locations from the customizer (in most themes.) You may not want to choose a location, however, if you plan to put this menu in a widget.
- Press Create Menu
You can see this button in the above image just below the “menu structure” area.
- Choose some items to add to the menu.
Check some boxes on the left and then press the Add to Menu button to add them to your menu. Note that you can add pages, add in custom links, categories, particular posts. And you may see more items here as you add some plugins.
- Arrange your menu.
You can drag and drop the menu items to create sub-menu items and sub-sub-menu items. Hint: if your menu items are being cooperative, you can also choose a link saying “Up one” or “Down one” to move the items.
- Press Save Menu
Save your menu by pressing the button at the bottom of the screen. Very important!
- Check out your new menu.
Check the front of your website to make sure your menu is appearing as you wish. For most themes, you can customize the colors of your menu and dropdown menus in the customizer.
For now, Zip just is going to use a basic menu. As he writes more content, he’ll come back and add more pages and categories to his menu to make it easier for visitors to find stuff.
One thing to think about: while you can add categories to the menu, if you have a particular type of content on your website that you really want to promote, you may want to consider making a landing page for it — kind of like a mini-homepage instead of just linking to one of the category templates. However, more and more premium themes are adding in template customizers that give you easier control over how your category pages appear.
And one more thing: One of the widgets you have is a navigation menu widget. You can create a menu to stick in a widget and add it, for instance, in your website footer.
Anyway, on with the fun and frustrating stuff: design. Let’s talk colors next!
