Creating your own custom navigation menu

Posted on July 26, 2011 by Sue Waters

Edublogs themes support custom menus which means you can customize your navigation menu.

This allows you to easily:

Re-arrange, add, and remove items from the menu bar at the top of your blog
Change the order of pages
Create nested pages
Display posts on multiple pages by linking to category pages
Add custom links to your navigation menu
Create a custom menu for your sidebar

Custom menus allow you to fully control the links that appear in your navigation menu- you can even add links to website and pages not on your blog!

Below’s an example of a custom menu with nested pages and custom links:

Custom Menu Video Tutorial

Watch the video below to learn how to create a custom navigation menu

Setting up a custom menu

1. Go to Appearance > Menus

2. Give your menu a name – ‘Main’ will work great!

3. Click on the ‘Create Menu‘

4. Select your categories you want to add to your menu then click Add to Menu.

You must have publish a post that has been assigned the categories you want to use before you will see the categories listed on the menu page.
Refer to Using categories to organize multiple classes or subjects on your blog to learn more about using categories with custom menus.

5. Now select the pages you want to add to your menu then click Add To Menu.

6. Create a custom link for home by adding your blog URL, the name Home and click Add To Menu.

When readers click on the Home link they will be taken to your front page.
For example the blog URL of this blog is http://help.edublogs.org/
You can use custom links to link to any website — which is really handy!

7. Now drag/drop the menu items to change their order in your menu.

Any menu item that is indented will appear as a nested page under tab.

Here’s what my menu now looks like:

8. Once you’ve finished changing the order click Save Menu.

9. Now to display your new top navigation on your blog you just need to select Main from under the Primary Navigation drop down menu and then click Save.

Custom menu tip

You can create static level tabs using a custom link if you just want a link name that doesn’t go to a page that exists.

For example, if you click on About in the top menu of this blog you’ll see it is a static level tab used just as a placeholder for page links we’ve added underneath it.