Managing your site's menu is really easy. In this article I'll go over the basics so you'll learn how to add and remove pages, organize pages into sub menus and change the name of the page as it appears on the menu. So lets get started. First to manage your menu login to your site and go to appearance > menus.
On the menu page on the left are the different items you can add to the menu. And on the right is the menu. You'll notice that sub menu items are indented under their parent. So in the example below pastor's blog, staff and service times & location are in a sub menu under about us. We'll talk about that more later. There are two save menu buttons one at the top and one at the bottom. Both do the same thing so you can use either one to save your menu.
Here you can see the menu as it shows on the website. You can see pastor's blog, staff and service times & location are in a sub menu under about us. You can also see the little down arrow that indicates the calendar menu item has a sub menu and looking at the picture above we can see that that menu item is the events list page.
We've created pages for six ministries and we want to add them to the menu. So on the left side under pages I checked all six of the ministry pages then clicked the add to menu button.
Now all the pages were added to the bottom of the menu. I'll click the save button and we can see what it looks like on the site.
Ok well they are all on the menu but it's sort of a mess. This is very common. What happens is there are more top level menu items than can fit on one line so it's causing some menu items to drop to a 2nd and in this case 3rd line. So we just need to organize the menu to fix this. We'll move all the ministry pages into a sub menu under ministries.
So back on the back end we just click and drag the kids ministry page up under the ministries page and just a little to the right. You'll see a dashed line that shows were the menu item will go if dropped. When you see that it's indented just let go of the mouse button to drop it into place. If you have trouble getting it to indent click the little down arrow to open the menu item and you'll see "move up one down one under ministries to the top" just click under ministries and it'll indent it for you.
Ok so we have moved all six ministries pages into a sub menu under ministries. I'll save the menu and we can see what it looks like on the site.
Ok that's much better. The menu doesn't wrap into more than one line and all ministries are listed in the ministries sub menu.
I'd like to go over the options available for each menu item. To see see these you'll need to click the little down arrow on the menu item to open it.
- Navigation Label is what shows in the menu for this item. By default the page title is the Navigation Label but sometimes that's not ideal. Maybe the page title is too long for example but you want that page title on the actual page you just need to shorten it on the menu. That's where Navigation Label come in.
- Title Attribute creates a little tool tip when you hover over a menu item. By default it's blank.
- Move - These are the options I talked about above. If you're having trouble dragging and dropping the menu item into the place you want it you can use these links to move it into place.
- Remove - Click this link to delete a menu item. Please note this only removes the menu item. It does not delete the page. So the page will still be there and can easily be added back to the menu.
The last thing I want to go over on the menu is links. These can be used for adding links to other sites. But we use them quite often to create menu items that you can't click. For example we have the ministries page that has a sub menu of all the ministry pages. But if someone clicks ministries they will be taken to the ministries page. Maybe you don't have any content on the ministries page so you don't want anyone going to that page you just want ministries as a heading for the ministries sub menu. To do that go to links for the url put in # and for link text put in Ministries or whatever you want it to say on the menu. Click add to menu then drag it into place like any other menu item. On the front end of your site it'll look like all the other menu items but if you click on it nothing will happen.
I hope this gives you a good understanding of the menu system. If you have any questions don't hesitate to contact us.