A Primer on How to Use the Custom Menus in WordPress

In WordPress 3.0 they introduced Custom Menus. This allows you to create your own navigation menus with way more flexibility. Now it is very simple to exclude pages from navigation, add categories or redirect a nav button to an outside page.

You will find the link to access the new menus in your WordPress dashboard. Under the Appearance heading, you will see “menus”. Click on that.

Once you have clicked on “menus”, you will see the above pane on the right of the page. The first step is to name your menu, and click “create menu”. Donʼt worry, this wonʼt change your nav yet. You just have to create a menu in order to edit it.  Add a name for the menu in the field, and click “create menu”.

Now that you have a menu created you can begin to customize it. On the left hand side of the page (beside the above image) you will see all the ways you can customize the menu:

The first area is where you can place the menu. The drop down menu will give tell you where your theme supports the custom menu.
Choose the spot you want to use.
Custom links area allows you to link to anything in your navigation. Simply add the URL or web address of the link, and then a label. The label is what will show up in your nav.
The Pages pane lets you add the pages of your site. if you donʼt want a page to appear, donʼt choose it. Check the pages you want to add and click “Add to Menu”
Much like the Pages pane, the Categories pane will allow you to add categories into your navigation. Add them the same way as above.

Once you are done adding what you want to your menu, the right hand of the page will look something like this:

All of the items you added to the menu, should appear in this pane. Each item will also have a drop down menu with a couple more ways to customize the menu. You can change the label here, and you can also add a title attribute. This title attribute is what will pop up when people hover the mouse over the menu item. When you are done customization, click on save menu and your new menu will appear wherever you chose on the theme locations pane.
One last way to use the custom menus is the widget. WordPress now has a custom menus widget, so you can drag your newly formed menu into any widget enabled areas on your site.

Not all themes are custom menus ready, check out the custom menu settings in your WordPress back office and it will tell you if your current theme takes advantage of this great new feature.