How to improve navigation on your WordPress site and make your site more user-friendly. Originally developed by Erika Barker.

1. WordPress
Improve your Navigation

2. This lesson requires that you complete the
“WordPress - Categories and Tags” activity
before you proceed any further.

3. A proper navigation (the menu at the top of the page),
ensures that your readers do not get annoyed by
excessive scrolling or clicking to navigate throughout
your website.

4. Click the “Appearance” panel in your WordPress
dashboard.
To customize your main menu:

5. Select the “Menus” sub-option.

6. In the Menu section, let’s first create a new menu. Type
“Menu” for menu name, and click the “Create Menu”
button when you are finished.

7. Next, we need to tell WordPress to override the
current menu. In the “Theme Locations” section, select
the menu you just created and click the “Save” button
when you are finished.

8. To create our first button, locate the “Custom Links”
section. Next, type your website address in the URL
field, and type “Home” for Label. Click the “Add to
Menu” button when you are finished.

9. Let’s add our categories to the menu. Scroll down to
the Categories section and click the “View All” tab.

10. Click the “Select All” link, and click the “Add to Menu”
button when you are finished.

11. Do the same thing for any Pages you wish to add.

12. There appear to be a lot of
buttons for this page. This
could create confusion
very quickly, and/or break
the look of our theme.
!
Let’s try creating a drop-
down menu to keep things
organized:

13. Drop-down buttons present the user with an organized
menu where they can quickly mouse over a button to
get further specific options.

14. To make a child button appear underneath a parent
button: simply drag the child button slightly to the right
(the child button should always be located directly
under the parent button).

15. In this example, when someone moves their mouse
cursor over “Articles”, a list of categories will appear.
Feel free to reorganize your menu by simply dragging
your buttons to the desired location.

16. Don’t forget to hit the “Save Menu” button when you
are finished.