Working with menus and navigation in WordPress (Part 13)

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This video tutorial walks through how to build a navigation system for your WordPress web site. There are many ways to create navigational elements that incorporate the most valuable pieces of information on your web site. Most commonly, a horizontal bar across the top or vertically along the left side of the page is space that is traditionally used for navigation.

You can build out almost any type of navigational menu structure you desire in WordPress. Some fancy adons exist for more advanced navigations, but right out of the box, WordPress does a pretty good job of the task.

Navigation should be considered an important part of the user interface and considerable thought must be giving to the language choice of the nav text. Whereever possible, use text navigation instead of images. Text is advantageous as it will help the search engines reinforce the theme of the page. The context of other content on your page will need to be similar or mesh well with your navigation, as this will help with page relevance.

If you have a bunch of unrelated elements on the page it tends to be less cohesive and less theme specific, which is always a good idea.

I’ve dealt with several clients where they put together a web page selling a service like cleaning, and the page loaded with menus to everything but that related to cleaning. On the home page, he had random images, and an audio file to a random song that auto played. Totally, unrelated to the page and a total distraction. Needless to say, this client believed his page was in need of no revamping, and ultimately, he could not be saved from an unsuccessful web site.

No one has all the right answers, but experimentation and looking at the site analytics will help you make wiser decisions on what needs changing, improving or just removing.