Date post: | 18-Jul-2015 |
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Internet |
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Setting up and Managing Your WordPress Menus
Melbourne WordPress User Meetup, April 2015
@chrisburgess
Outline
• Importance of user experience (UX), information architecture and
navigation
• Impact of theme on navigation options available
• Creating pages and ordering
• Creating a WordPress menu for your theme navigation
• How to add custom link to your menu
• How to add a category to your menu
• Creating WordPress menus for widget areas
• Menu plugins and mega menus
Before you start building…plan
• Do your research, see what others have done
• Keep terms simple and intuitive to the user
• Avoid confusion with labels (e.g is it ‘Shop’ or ‘Shop Locations’)
• Use standard conventions (e.g ‘Contact’, ‘About’, ‘Products’ etc.)
• What are your categories? Map them out by parent and child.
• Use keywords/keyphrases if natural (e.g for SEO and usability)
• Avoid multi level menus. Try and stick to one sub level menu.
• Use hover effects like colour or highlight indicate where the cursor is.
• Think responsive. Review how your menu looks on the mobile
version of your theme. Commonly you’ll see these collapsed into a
single ‘menu’ button or a ‘hamburger’ menu
“While content is supposed to be unique, surprising and exciting,
navigating to it is supposed to be as simple and predictable as
possible.”
Anastasios Karafillis, Smashing Magazine
Different themes offer different navigation locations – check documentation for this
• Twenty Fifteen theme navigation locations
• Genesis – Magazine Pro Theme
Before you create a menu - create pages
• Note depending on your theme and settings, sometimes pages are
automatically added to your menu, you can override this in the menu
section we cover next.
Good practice - order your pages to match your navigation to help you easily reference your content
1 2 3
0 0 0
Tick the pages you want to add > Click add to menu • You can search by ‘most recent’ or ‘view all’ or ‘search’ to find the page you
want to add
Customising the Menu Label
• If you click on the arrow and drop the item down you can edit the menu
text
Select the theme location for your menu
• If you want your menu to appear in the main navigation area tick ‘primary
menu’
You can create custom links for…
• External URLs
• Pages
• Categories
• Tags
• Custom Post Types and Taxonomies
Click to drag into a widget area
• Give your menu a name e.g ‘Browse by Category’
• Select the menu you have already created back in ‘Menus’ from the drop
down list of available menus
Mega Menu Example - Home Page
• WordPress Codex
• https://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Menu_User_Guide
• https://codex.wordpress.org/Appearance_Menus_Screen
• https://codex.wordpress.org/Navigation_Menus
• Essential Navigation Checklists for Web Design
• http://www.sitepoint.com/checklists-web-design/
• Efficiently Simplifying Navigation, Part 1: Information Architecture
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/12/03/efficiently-
simplifying-navigation-information-architecture/