8 step guide to creating a WordPress Navigation Menu

Some yummy mummy bloggers have been asking for advice about setting up their WordPress blogs, so here is a starting topic – How to get your blog to sort posts out to certain menu headings.

Choose your categories

First thing is first, you need to sort your categories out… the Categories will determine which page to put the post on.So for example with my blog, I have Competitions, Noah Constant, Numero 2 and Reviews as my categories and these are the “pages” I have on my navigation bar. I say pages loosely as technically it isn’t a page… this will be explained further down!

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Editing your categories

Under the “Posts” tab in your admin, choose “Categories” and  add the categories that you would like to sort your posts into. You might want something like blog general, blog recipes, blog crafts etc, depending on what your wonderful blog is about!

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Creating your homepage

In order to have a homepage, you will need to create one under “Pages” and then “Add New”, when you have created this page, put whatever static information you would like on this page. If you do not want a homepage and you want people to go straight to a page of categorised posts then dont worry about creating this page.

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Create a blog page

Create a “blog” page, whilst you are here, just have it as a standard format page. No further amendments necessary to the page.

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Creating your menu

Under “Appearance” and “Menus“, you will be able to add what you want to the menu by choosing pages, categories and/or external links. My navigation setup is very simple,  I have a page as my homepage and then 4 categories.To add a page, tick the page required and add to menu. To add a category, do exactly the same but tick the required category and click add to menu. On the right hand side you will have a list of the things showing up on your menu, you can sort them by dragging and dropping above and below each other, if you want a sub menu then you can drag a menu option underneath another menu option and you will notice the “sub” will appear slightly to the right of the “parent” menu option. Hope that makes sense! When you have formatted the menu how you want it, give it a name and make sure you “Save Menu“. Under the heading “Theme Locations”, select the menu you just created by choosing it from the drop down menu in Primary Navigation. You should now have a navigation bar on your blog!

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Setting your Reading options

Under “Settings” and “Reading Settings” you have the options to choose where your blog posts go and whether you want a static homepage etc.If you want your frontpage to show a static homepage, ie “home” then check the “A Static Page” option and choose your page named home, that you created earlier. Then set blog posts to go to the page named “blog”.This should have set up the navigation, the categories and your homepage settings, so your blog understands where the posts need to go. Now all you need to do is the “boring” bit, depending on how many posts you have.

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Editing your posts and changing their category

Now you have “new” categories, or different ones depending on what you had before, you need to go through each and every posts and choose just 1 category. This effectively sorts your posts out into the different categories and allows you to see those posts when you click on that navigation link!

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Refresh your blog

Once you have gone through all the posts, refresh your blog and it should have a navogation bar with specific posts going to specific places!!

Hey presto!!

 

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