Part of the WordPress Beginners Series

Update: Since this article was published, WordPress has introduced a new type of template that requires you to look in other places to set up the menus for some sites. If you do not see Menus in the “Appearance” section of your WordPress site, it is likely because you have used one of the new style templates. If that is the case, then you will need to follow the information available in this video: “Menus No longer available under Appearance in WordPress“.

In the post “Adding Navigation Menus to WordPress” I showed you how to go in and create that base level navigation menu. Now that my site has started to take on a bit more content, I have decided to create a page dedicated to the WordPress Beginners Series, and so I want to change that menu so it more closely reflects how I want my users to view my website.

I had previously chosen to have my menu display categories, and to have top level pages automatically added to my menu. Along the way, I decided to start publishing this WordPress Beginners Series. I wanted to highlight this beginners series in my site, so I decided to create a page so I would have better control of how the information about the pages I add to that series are presented.

A page allows me total flexibility, but a Category page is automated to post links to posts tagged with a specific category. See the difference here:

This link is to the page and has the url https://kevinwtharp.com/wordpress-beginners-series/

This link is to the category page and has the url https://kevinwtharp.com/category/wordpress/beginners/

When I created the top level page, it was automatically added to the Menu because I had selected that option. The result was that I had a page and a category page both linked from the Main Menu with the same words but going to different places.

So following the rule of form follows function I decided to change my menu to include the page as a top level menu option because I wanted to include more information than the content of the posts with the correct category, and I wanted to direct my users to that page.

The video below walks you through the process of updating the menus in WordPress, and goes into additional information about the use of automated content versus specific content in menus in WordPress.