Theme Customization – Menus

In prior posts, we covered how to customize the header of your WordPress blog and how to set the layout and background of your blog. In this tutorial we will discuss customizing another very powerful elements of WordPress; navigational menus

Your readers need to be able to easily find and navigate to the various sections and pages of your blog. This becomes particularly important as your blog grows.

The default menu of the Twenty Eleven theme includes a link to the home page and links to any other pages you create for your blog. For example when you create an “About Us” and “Contact Us” the page titles will automatically appear in the menu at the top of all your blog pages and be linked to those pages. That works well for a few pages, but becomes less helpful the larger your blog becomes. Additionally, you may have pages such as a “thank you” page or download page that you don’t want showing in the menu.

Customize the menu to control exactly what appears in it.

To begin changing your menu, log into your dashboard and expand the Appearance menu selection. Then click Menus from the list below:

Let’s create a new menu called “Top Nav.” Simply type that new name in the blank space next to “Menu Name.”

Now add whatever links, pages and categories you want to be in your new menu.

The Twenty Eleven theme supports one menu, located directly under the header image. Even though you’ve just created a menu, you haven’t yet told WordPress to display that new menu instead of the default one. Let’s do that now.

Now that you have more than one menu available, a new box – entitled “Theme Locations” –appears on your Menus page. From the drop-down list for your Primary Menu, select the new “Top Nav” menu we just created, and click “Save”:

Now when you revisit your blog, you’ll see the new menu just underneath your header image:

As you build new pages for your blog you will want to add them to this menu.

You can also add links to pages outside of your blog, for example one of your social media profiles. For this tutorial, let’s just a link to a Twitter feed. Locate the “Custom Links” box on the menus page. Type the web address of your twitter feed in the “URL” box, then type “Twitter” in the “Label” box. Now click the “Add to Menu” button and a link to that Twitter feed will appear on your new Top Nav menu. Click the “Save Menu” button and your new menu will be ready to use.

As your blog (and your business) grows, you will likely want to continue updating your custom menu to reflect new categories of content, new promotional campaigns and other things you want to highlight to your readers.

The power of WordPress menus becomes even more apparent when you eventually decide to switch to a theme other than the Twenty Eleven default theme that comes with a new WordPress installation. Many other themes support more than one menu on the screen at a time. This enables you to highlight different parts of your blog in different menus.

For example, you might set up a menu of your blog’s most important or most frequently visited pages (like an “About Me” page and a “Contact Me” page) and display this near the top of your blog. You might also put a menu in your sidebar to highlight other portions of your blog, or to promote your affiliate or other business relationships. By harnessing the power of WordPress menus, you’ll make sure to do the best possible job in making it easy for you readers to find what they’re looking for on your blog.

In the next tutorial you’ll learn how to customize your sidebar using widgets.

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You might also like these posts:

• How to Find and Install WordPress Plugins
• Blog Customization – Install a New Theme
• Theme Customization – Sidebar