How to make a “Primary menu” for your website

Navigation is key to designing a useful and meaningful website. What your readers can and will experience as they move from page to page is determined largely by the connections you create and imply on your site. A menu is a standard site feature and can be configured as a series of submenus that help you create hierarchies and other relationships that influence the ways readers experience your site.

Before you can create a menu, you must have pages and/or posts created already. If you haven’t done so, please create the following pages for this class:

An “About” page: this will tell us something about the website and/or its author relevant to the site’s purpose

A “Reading Response” page

A “Primary Source Descriptions” page

An “Annotated Bibliography” page

A “Final Analysis” page

and a “Class Work” page

So these six pages will exist on your website. You can just create the pages without putting any content on them, just a title (use the ones in quotation marks above). To do so:

Go to your dashboard.

Click Pages/Add New.

Give the page a title.

Click “Publish”

When you’ve created all these pages, you can click “All Pages” on your dashboard. You will see the pages listed like this:

1. Now go to “Appearance” on your dashboard, and click “Menus”

When you “create menu” you move to here:

Now you’re ready to add pages to your menu. Simply check the boxes of all the pages you want to appear on your main menu and click “Add to Menu”:

4) Now you can arrange your pages and create submenus:

5) SAVE MENU!!!!

6) The configuration above looks like this on the front end:

Notice the menu for this theme is configured as a left sidebar. Notice, too, the dropdown arrow next to “Class work.” Clicking on this shows the “Gradian” page:

Different themes will configure menus differently. If something’s not working the way you want it to, you might try a different theme.