WordPress Appearance Options: Drag and Drop to Create and Manage WordPress Menus
All Artbiz Artist Themes support at least one WordPress menu. If Artbiz installed WordPress and set up your site, then you will have a menu created. In the example below you can see that the main menu has already been added and populated. The “main menu” will be selected to appear in the “Theme Location” (see #2 below); again, already done for you.
Use this tutorial to create a new menu, add new pages to the existing menu or change the order that your pages appear in your site’s navigation. You will learn to manage a WordPress built in menu through the drag and drop method.
Note: If you don’t create or use a menu, by default, WordPress will add your pages to the site navigation. In this case you will need to assign a page order number when creating a page. It’s much easier to use menus.
Also, use WordPress menus to add custom links to external websites or add a dummy parent (a menu item that is not linked to a page) for child pages (sub-pages).
Appearance>Menus:
Under the Appearness tab, navigate to Menus
Theme Locations: This area tells you how many areas are available to have a menu. Even if your theme doesn’t support menus, you can create a menu to use in your sidebar by using the “custom menu” widget (see using widgets).
The image above indicates the menu area for the new responsive themes. If you want to create a menu that will only show on mobile devices you can do so and select it here. Otherwise select and use the Main Menu. See #4 below on the Social Media menu option.
Menu Task Pane:
1. To create a new menu. click the link “create a new menu” and a blank menu page will appear.
2. Give the menu a name. The menu name is for your own use so you’ll know which menu is which. The menu name does not appear on the site.
3. Then Click “Create Menu”
4. Once the menu has been created, add your menu items as described in items 4, 5 & 6 below. Then drag and drop the menu items into any order you want, as well as nest them with another item by pulling your mouse to the right and drop when you see the indent.
5. Click the blue “save menu” button.
Custom Links: If you want to create a link to an external site, Facebook or Twitter, you can add a custom link to your menu. Go to the site you want to link to and copy and paste the URL from the browser address bar into the URL box. Then provide a label (the label can be whatever you want) and click “add to menu”.
All Artbiz pre-designed themes have a social media menu in the footer. Follow the instructions on how to create a new menu and assign it to the Social Media location. Use Links as described above to add icon based links to your social media sites.
Pages: This lists all the static pages currently on your site. To add them to the menu, check the box next to the ones you want and click the “Add to Menu” button. You can also click “select all” to have all items appear. There are three tabs at the top of this area that provide options to find pages; Most Recent, View All or Search if you have many pages.
Categories: The proceedure to add blog categories is the same as adding pages (see #5 above). NOTE: If your site’s landing page is set up for a static page (see Landing Page) then you may not want to add categories, since the page you created for your blog will appear in the navigation by adding the page you created for it.
SAVE, SAVE, SAVE: Every time you make a change, add or remove menu items you must save the menu for the changes to take effect.
Editing Menu Items Further
Once you have your menu populated you can change the navigation labels. The screenshot below shows a menu item in the open position.
Page:
Click the arrow next to the word page to expand a menu item
Navigation Label: This is the actual name of the page that you want to appear in the menu. It can be a shortened version of the original name.
Title Attribute: Good SEO (search engine optimization) practice is to provide a title attribute; a short description of what is on that page. It also appears when your visitor’s mouse hovers over a menu item or any link on your site.
Original: If you name your pages with a SEO friendly title, like the example shows, it may be too long for your menu. This is why you would provide a navigation label as outlined in #2 above.
Remove | Cancel: If you change your mind and want to start over, click cancel. To remove an item from the menu, click remove. This doesn’t delete the actual page only removes it from the menu.
Move:Rather than drag and drop you can simply click the link to move the menu item down one, up one and others. Personally I think it’s easier to drag and drop but if indenting is causing you grief use the links
Creating a Dummy Parent or nonfunctioning menu item
A number of artists like to nest their Bio, CV and Artist Statement with a parent menu item called About or About the artist without the navigation item click-able. To do this without creating a page that you may not have content for, you can create a menu item that does not link. When a visitor hovers over the About menu item, a drop down menu will appear with links to your sub pages.
1. To do this, use Custom Link (see #4 above). The item will not add to the menu without a URL. Insert the pound (hashtag) # in the field, make sure you remove the https:// and insert only the #
2. In the Navigation Label, provide the dummy link with a label and click add to menu.
3. Drag and drop the pages you want listed under the dummy link and nest them by pulling and dropping the item to the right. Child pages will appear indented.
4. Save the menu and refresh your browser to see the changes.
Let’s give our site a make over by simply changing the Background of your WordPress site
