Many of you will have imported a set of pages that put a long, long navigation menu on the left-hand side of your site. WordPress allows you more opportunities for linking to resources, and chunking of information in different ways. This can relieve you from having to put every important link into that big long list. It will also make your site much more usable.
The Quick Temporary Fix
If you are not sure you want to get rid of these pages, or need more time to figure out what to do with that content, you can suppress the display of these links until you have time to re-organize. You can also suppress the display of them permanently — it’s your choice with the “Page Links” tool. Here’s how >
Information Chunking with The Links Widget
Go through all of your primary links and see if you can place them into categories that make sense to your user. One method is to find all the links that are NOT pages on your site, but rather links to other resources or sites. Once you have them “chunked” into groups (it may all be one group), create a “Links” list for each category, and type your links in there. Here’s how >
Removing Temporary or Seasonal Links
Do you really need the link to that annual symposium to remain in your primary navigation all year long? Of course you don’t, and that kind of stuff makes your site look abandoned and irrelevant. That’s where posts and the “Recent Posts” Widget come in. Go through that primary navigation list again and see all of the stuff that is temporary or seasonal. Those should be republished as posts so they show up in your RSS Feed at the appropriate time of the year. Did you know you can even change the publish date of a post so it shows up AFTER you create it? That way, you can paste that content into a post, and change the publication date to the future when you know you want it to show up! Badda-bing! Get a refresh of posts and publishing dates here >
Custom Menus
All sites have access to Custom Menus, which can be displayed in the Top Bar or in the Custom Menus Widget (Note: Administrative Departments do not have a top bar navigation by default). You can use this top bar to really pull out the items in your primary navigation that are the most important. This is done through the use of Custom Menus. Here’s more about Custom Menus >
