WordPress Custom Menus: DIY Design

Another apology (see? it’s the week for saying sorry!) for my readers who are NOT on WordPress. But for those who are?**

You’re welcome.

Because what I’m about to show you may change your life.

**There are some themes that are not Custom Menu compatible. If you have one of those themes, I suggest that you contact the person who created it, and ask if they can make a few switches to let you use the Custom Menu tool.

**If you do want to use Custom Menus, you will have to enable them in your theme — usually, it’s not set as the default.

When WordPress launched version 3.0 of its platform, it introduced the Custom Menu tool, which is now available under Appearance on your settings menu.

Custom Menu Tool

(click the images to see them larger)

Custom Menus allow you to drag and drop pages, categories and even external URLs to your navigation bar(s), in whatever order you like. This is hugely freeing, people!

In my screengrab above, you can see that I have a mixture of pages and categories displayed. This works because for certain pages:

• About
• Contact
• Video Reel

the content won’t change very often.

But for others:

• Healthy Living
• Social Media
• Five for Friday

The content changes on a near-daily basis.

Previously, if you wanted both pages and categories to appear on the same nav bar, you had to be a bit of a code ninja (or hire one). Now, you can drag and drop the items wherever you want them (and it’s easy to nest items that aren’t nested in your actual blog hierarchy — for instance, I have Media Kit, Policies and Races & Reviews nested under my “About” page, but in real life, they’re all top level pages on their own).

Finally, the ability to put a URL on the navbar is A.Freaking.Mazing.

For example, on my blog, I’ve been able to add #Fitblog Chats to my navbar, but it actually links OFF the site to http://fitblogchats.com.

For Custom Menus alone, I think that WordPress is the place to be when it comes to blogging, but if you disagree, I’d love to hear why!

What other questions do you have about blogging and/or social media? Let me know or post it on my “Ask Me” page!

P.S. If you want more of a how-to on this topic, check out this video from For Bloggers By Bloggers.