You may want to setup a menu on your WordPress blog or perhaps you have setup your website using WordPress.  Having a menu is a good idea for organizing your content and making navigating your site easy for your visitors.

Here are a few tips on organizing to create a menu

Your Plan

When you are designing your website or blog – think of how the content should be organized. What are the main headings – what topics would fit under these main headings. As your website grows having an organized structure is a real help to the visitors so they can find information easily.   It also helps you as you add new pages and posts to know where you will put them.

Using Pages and Sub Pages

When you create a new page in WordPress you can assign it as a main page or a sub page.

Using Categories

Assigning a category is a first step in being able to create a menu item from your POSTS. Think about your categories and how they relate to the major topics of your blog or website. For example on the Out and About Nova Scotia website – PLACES is a category. Any new post that has to do with a PLACE is assigned this category and a place name is assigned as a sub-category. See the PLACES menu with its sub categories.

Managing Categories

If you wish to rename, delete of change a category you will find this under POSTS – CATEGORIES on your dashboard.   This is also a good place to see the overview of all your categories and the number of POSTS assigned to each category and the hierarchy.

Managing your Menu

The Menu manager is found under Appearances on your dashboard. On the left you see a list of all the PAGES you have created. Click the check box(es) next to the pages you want to add to the menu and drag them onto the menu on the right. Then reorder the pages according to your plan. You can make sub pages by indenting a page under another page.

If you wish to add a CATEGORY as a menu item – select the category from the list that you see when you click on “Categories” on the bottom left section. Then select the category you want and add it to the menu on the right.

Be sure to SAVE your menu.

You can select to add your pages automatically when you create them – or each time you want a new page on the menu go through the steps above. You can rearrange pages and posts as your site grows.

Categories Widget

Use the CATEGORIES widget to add a categories drop down list with number of posts on your sidebar. This works well if you have a lot of categories and gives a good overview for the website visitor

Examples

• www.outandaboutns.com – Places and Categories are posts that are added to the menu through the CATEGORY option
• www.yourinternetstrategies.com – See the “Categories” widget on the right sidebar with a dropdown of categories and number of posts in each category.
• www.artshealthantigonish.org – the UPDATES menu item points to POSTS that have category = updates