Basic Rules of WordPress Menus

Like all websites, creating proper menu items, and menu structures, allows a user of your department website to navigate your website with ease. Properly titling menu items, and ordering them in sensical matter, is pertinent to a successful website menu structure. The WordPress Dashboard will allow to create three types of menus:

1. A header menu, often in a dropdown style (depending on the design of your departmental website)
2. A footer menu, located at the bottom of the page
3. A side menu – this is a menu that will appear on the right side of a page that is contained with a particular menu structure – for example, an Undergraduate section within a main header of ACADEMICS would have a side menu of all pertinent pages created within that particular Undergraduate section of the website)

When first creating the redesign of a departmental website, the key 6-8 top header menu items are often predetermined by the department when working with the web operations team. If you were involved in that decision making you are already aware of what those 6-8 main header items are (i.e. About, Academics, People) – these main header items should be seen as permanent by all except the manager of the website for each department, and should not be changed at any time.

If you’ve been charged with adding pages to the website, and need to have those pages added to the menu structure of the website, the pages within this section will explain how to do such.