How To Create A WordPress Menu

Setting up a menu or a custom menu was always kind of a mystery to me because I didn’t make the connection between a well thought out menu and good site architecture.

I guess I was busy figuring out all the other stuff about WordPress and I just hadn’t gotten to menus and category creation.

Anyway, learning to set up a menu is really important and you should take the time to learn to do it right.

One thing I point out is how you should select the options in your screen options area of the dashboard.

No one really demonstrated how to use this feature and it wasn’t until I was asked about getting posts into a wordpress custom menu that I learned you could select the post option under screen options.

So take in the video and you see how to configure your screen options to help you design the optimum wordpress menu for your website.

If you find the video helpful, don’t forget to “tweet”,”like” or “google +1″ this post. Many thanks for your support.

For those who like text, there is a transcript of the video. Enjoy.

Hey, Claude Pelanne here from the Affiliate Starting Line. Welcome. This is

going to be video two in a Category Menu series and this one’s about menus.

Now menus are part of the process of organizing the information that you’re

presenting on your website. In other words, it’s part of site architecture,

thinking through your website. It’s important to think about these, lay

them out on, I do it now on paper before I do it in here. But let’s take a

look and see how this menu dashboard works.

 

First, you get to the menu dashboard by coming to your Appearance tab,

coming down to menus. Now if I click Appearance it’s going to show me my

themes, because that’s what I’ve got selected. So I’ll come down here and

click Menu and it brings me to my Menu dashboard. Now right now, there’s

nothing in it. Let’s take a look and see what this menu dashboard consists

of. There’s menus here on the left-hand side, there’s a blank sidebar.

We’re going to fill that shortly.

 

On the right-hand side is where you create menus, and then I’m going to

point out a very important thing here that I overlooked for a long time,

because nobody ever explained it to me. Screen Options. When you open that

up, it’s going to give you options here for items that you’re going to be

using when you’re creating menus. By default I think it shows pages, but

what I do is I click all of them on. I want everything, and I want

everything down here. Do that. Do yourself a favor, do that and you’ll help

yourself when you’re designing your menus, and then we’ll come back here

later to see what these mean.

 

You’re going to see great out here, Custom Links, Posts, Pages, Categories,

Tags. When you create a menu, you come in here and we’re going to create a

main menu. Main menu that we’re going to create. Now you’ll see the screen

has come alive. Under the main menu, you can select certain things. Custom

Links we’ll come to later. It’s got an application when you’re putting in a

unique item into your menu, and it has a URL. I wouldn’t worry about that

right now. But what I missed for a long time was Posts. You can put posts

into menus.

 

Pages, everybody knows that because that’s what, really, it defaults to so

if you have a page and let’s say, what most people do is they will have,

let’s take a look at Categories. We don’t want that. We usually have the

Disclaimer, the About. Now here’s another thing. There’s a menu here that

says, “Most Recent, View All, Search.” Click the View All, which is why I

should have done. Now it’s going to show me everything, and on a typical, a

category main menu selection I would have the Home, the About Us, the

Disclaimer, the Disclosure and the Privacy. I might even have a Site Map. I

check those off. I come down here and add to menu.

 

Now I’ve added to menu and I’ve created a menu with these items and it’s

called Main Menu. You’ll notice, if I come back up to Screen Options and I

were to deselect Posts, Posts would disappear from the sidebar, or deselect

Custom Links. It disappears. You want them to be there. Because there are

going to be instances, even though you’re going to be using Pages and

Categories, for the most part, to create your menus, there are going to be

times when you want posts in there because you want them to appear in the

drop down off the nav bar, but we’ll get into that in another video.

 

You want to make sure that you always come to Screen Options and select

them all. Now, the upper selections pertain to the sidebar, the lower

selections pertain to the interior here, the dropdown for each menu item.

So when I drop it down there I get a URL, I get the navigation label, the

title attribute, the CSS class, the link relationship and the description.

You can optimize each one of these categories here, putting in information

here, the description, the link relationship you use when you’re doing the

rel author and setting up your authorship classification for Google. That

sort of thing.

 

You can rename, I could rename this from Home to the name of the website so

that it would be keyword rich, WP Trainer. Assuming that was a keyword. If

I do that and I click save, Home now becomes WP Trainer, which would be a

great SEO thing. Home just doesn’t mean anything, but if you have a title

that has a great keyword value and SEO value, you might want to rename it.

That’s how you can do it from within the menu dashboard. That’s why you

want to know about these options up here, for Screen Options.

 

Now we’ve just created this menu and it’s called the Main Menu. I can

always come back and create another menu. If I click plus, it’s going to

ask me to create another menu. This time I can say I want a Category menu,

and I can create it. Now it’s going to give me a blank form here and I can

start putting in categories. If I have categories here I view them all. If

I’m interested in putting them in, I click them all. I add to menu.

 

Now I’ve created a second menu which is a Category menu. Same thing. I can

come in here and optimize these, thanks to the selections that I gave up

here in my Screen Options and, as you know, I still have my Posts, my

Custom Links, Pages, Categories, Tags, all here. All these can be added to

a menu. That’s how the back end, now what do you do with these menus?

That’s another video. You can put these menus into a widget sidebar, let’s

leave this page, just briefly. Here you can see a list of drop-down menus

of categories. There’s one. Let me take a look. I guess if I drag this over

here to Categories, it will create a category display. Which is what we saw

in the other, and that’s how you get your categories into the sidebar.

 

Custom menu. Now that’s what I was looking for. That’s what you can drag in

here and then you give it the title. Pick the menu that you want. We just

created Category, then that’s the one I wanted. Give it a title and that

will take that menu and put it into the sidebar. I’ll take the main menu,

call it Main Menu. Save it. Now I have a custom menu and my categories in

the sidebar of the website. So that’s how you can use the menu dashboard.

We’re going to go into greater detail on the next video, but I just wanted

to give you an overview of how to setup menus, and the different parts of

what you have to do that and the real takeaway is to make sure that your

screen options have been selected. That’s it. I hope this video helps. This

is Claude Pelanne at Affiliate Starting Line. Stay with it, stay well and

we’ll talk to you soon.