Working with WordPress Menus

This week for the WordPress Wednesday series I am talking about working with WordPress Menus.

WordPress Menus are easy to use and there is quite a bit you can do to use them to their full potential on your site.

Here is the video I made for you this week, Working with WordPress Menus

Here is the WordPress menu user guide right from the WordPress codex.  If you really like to read information, this is a great resource for you.

One thing to know right off the bat is that you first have to have content created before you can add it to your menu.  It is always a good idea to create a few pages, posts and categories before you begin to set up your website, including creating menus.

I always recommend sitting down with a pen and paper to create a diagram of your website strategy…  I will save the details on that for another blog post, but you will want to know how you want to build your menu out.

Navigate to the Appearance tab > then select Menu

Now you will click the create a new menu link

The content you have available to add to your menus are listed on the left

You will tick the boxes to select what you would like to add to your menu and then click the Add to Menu button.  These items will then be listed on the right-hand side where you are creating the menu.

As you continue to add items to your menu they will always be added to the bottom of your menu.

Once you have some items in your new menu, you can drag and drop them to rearrange the menu order.  From top to bottom will display on your website as left to right.

You can also “nest” items by dragging them to the right just a tad.   This creates a subitem that is only displayed when hovering over the main item. ( watch the video to see this in action)

Displaying the Menu

Once you have a menu created and saved, you can set the menu location.  You have two ways to do this… simply check the menu location box below your new menu or click on the Manage Locations tab at the top.

You can create as many menus as you would like and they will never show up on your website until you set a menu location.

This brings me to…

Custom Menus

You can add menus to widget areas rather than or in addition to the theme menu locations as well.  Now, not all themes will have styling included for menus in all widget areas, but many do.  To do this, you navigate to Appearance > widgets

From here you can drag a Navigation Menu widget and drop it into a widget area, like your primary sidebar.  Then select a menu from the drop-down that displays all the menus you currently have created.