Video:

Transcript:

In this video, we're going to talk about menus in site navigation. Without good navigation, people
 won't be able to find all the excellent content on your website. I can't stress enough how 
important quality site navigation is. Don't just throw something together. Think about it, plan it 
out and make a structure when building it you don't even have to put the content into your pages 
just get the pages there so that you have a metal sitemap then you know where things are going to 
go let's take a look at how to make menus in WordPress under appearance menus this is where we make 
them we have none right now so let's make one I will call it primary nav you can call it anything 
you want they won't show up on the front to the website and now we have a primary menu with nothing 
in it over here our site pages posts custom links and categories if we open up screen options you'll 
see that we can also put in submissions tags and format there are some other things here too and 
we'll take a look at those in a minute so now let's do pages let's put the news in there now if we 
open this up we can see the title and we can see where it's linking and we could move or cancel 
under screen options we can add to that a link target so we could open it in a new tab if we wanted 
a title attribute CSS classes so that we could target this specifically if we wanted to a link 
relationship so that we can connect it to another place and optionally a description the description 
is only displayed in the menu if the theme supports it some do some don't you'll have to test your 
theme I also want to put in an attractions link so that in one menu I can link to the museum the zoo 
in the aquarium etc but I don't have that page so I'm going to click save menu go to pages and new 
attractions and simply click publish and now at some other time I can come back and fill out the 
content for this page or someone else could, anyone could. But I need it right now for my menus, so 
now I'm going to click aquarium, zoo, museum and attractions and click Add to menu. Now they're all 
right there, next to each other, in a row. I'm going to click Save menu and now this menu isn't 
showing anywhere on the site, yet I can show you that. Simply reload and there's nothing. Themes 
have what's called menu positions so we can put this menu either in the footer or the main menu. I'm
 going to click main menu and now there it is. The problem is we don't want zoo, museum and aquarium 
right there at the top of these others so all we have to do is drag them slightly to the right and 
it turns them into sub items. If we want to do this alphabetically, I can drag aquarium to the top 
and now click Save menu. Now if I reload it makes drop-down menus alphabetical. Now that's also 
related to the theme. Not all themes utilise drop-down menus and so, in some cases, you might make a 
drop-down menu here and it simply won't show. That's entirely up to the theme. Our theme happens to 
do it very nicely. So now let's also add civics, map and feedback. I like having civics here and I 
like having feedback last on my sites - just a personal preference. There we are. Now there's a page 
under civics home safety. If we add that then we can drag it right up here, put it here and save 
menu and there it is. Now you don't have to have every page that you own in your navigation. There 
are a variety of options, for example, you may recall that there is a custom menu widget so we could 
create a new menu and call it attractions. Then we could take the museum, the zoo and the aquarium, 
add them, save and choose not to put it anywhere at all. Then if we go to widgets, we can do custom 
menu, call it attractions and hit save and there we have our attractions menu. Now one more thing 
about widgets. Even though this is the widgets video, there are plugins you can get that allow you 
to say right here what page you want the widget to be on so you can fill up your sidebar but the 
widgets will only show on certain pages. So we could make the attractions show only when on the 
attractions page and we could make these blog widgets only show on the news page. We have one more 
option for menus. Let's choose our primary nav. Again, we can also put it in the footer menu. So now 
that it's in header. The footer: if we reload, you'll see down here at the very bottom there's our 
navigation. So if you end up with a very long page, you may not want people to have to go all the 
way back up to the top to find your navigation. They can find it also down here. But you'll note 
that the dropdowns do not work in this one. That's why it might be useful to have it so that when 
they click attractions, the sub nav is right there. I'd like to reiterate how important site 
navigation is. Not only do your users use it, but Google reads it. It's how Google crawls your 
website, it's how it knows what's important, it's how it knows the structure of your website. So be 
sure to think carefully about how you build it, what's in it and how easy it is for people to use.