Creating a Navigation Menu

Follow these steps and within minutes you’ll have a nice navigation menu and a complete understanding on how it works:

Figure 1: “The Appearance > Menus” screen.

1. Log-in to Your WordPress Dashboard and go to Appearance → Menus
2. Insert a name for your menu, if you have none.
3. Click on “Create Menu” if you don’t have any, or “Save Menu” if you already have one and you want to update it.
4. Once you have your menu, you can add Pages, Categories or Custom Links. To add pages or categories check the box beside and add them by clicking the button. To add custom links fill in the URL and Label fields and click the “Add to Menu” button.
5. Freely organize it by dragging and dropping items from your menu, putting them in the order you want or creating sub-menus (simply giving hierarchy to the structure). Remember to save the changes when you are finished.
6. Assign your menu to a theme location. This is really important, because it will be the location in which the menu you’ve created and edited will be appearing.

Ordering menu items

As mentioned in step number 4, it is really simple to set an order for items. You just need to drag and drop each item in the place you want it to appear.

Setting sub items, and hierarchies

You just need to drag and drop  each item horizontally.

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1. On your WordPress Dashboard, go to NiceThemes → Theme Options.
2. Browse the different sections and sub-sections, and change all the values you want.
3. When you’re done with the changes, click the Save Options button at the top.

In case you ever want to revert all options to their default values, you can click the Reset Options link, also at the top of the options panel. But be careful, because the process can’t be undone.

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Why should I care about permalinks?

Because they are used to access your content.

• People enter a permalink in their browser address bar to open a specific page of your website.
• You use permalinks in your email newsletters or social media posts to provide direct access to your content.
• Other websites use permalinks to link to your content from their pages.
• Search engines use permalinks to fetch and index your content, and link to it in their results.

Note that changing a permalink doesn’t automatically update all external links pointing to it, so doing so will result in a 404 error. That’s why they are called permalinks: because they shouldn’t change, they are supposed to be permanent. So, the ideal scenario is to choose a permalink structure right from the start, and stick to it.

SEO-friendly URLs

SEO-friendly URLs are important because they can improve your chance to rank higher in search engines. They contain keywords related to their content, and are easy to read by both humans and search engines.

This is a plain URL. As you can see, it doesn’t provide any relevant information.

http://nicethemeswp.com/?p=123

This is a SEO-friendly URL. Note the post name, which is a relevant keyword.

http://nicethemeswp.com/sample-post/

WordPress lets you choose your permalink structure and, since version 4.2, the default one is SEO-friendly. Ideally, you should define your structure before going live, and then you should stick to it.

Configuring your permalink structure

Internally, the SEO-friendly URLs are handled by WordPress’ rewrite rules in your .htaccess file. Luckily, configuring them from the admin is very easy.

• In your WordPress Dashboard, go to Settings → Permalinks.
• On Common Settings, choose your preferred permalink structure, or enter a custom one (you can use any of these tags).
• Click Save Changes. Your rewrite rules will be automatically flushed.
• That’s it! Your new structure should now be functional.

Changing your permalinks

As we stated before, if you change a permalink, or your whole structure, all the links already pointing to the affected URLs would lead to 404 errors. So, if you ever needed to do so, you must create a 301 redirect for each affected URL: that way, when a user enters your site using an old permalink, he or she will be automatically redirected to the new one, and will be able to browse your content normally. Note that you always lose your social media share counts, because social networks will not follow the redirects and always treat the new URLs as brand new pages.

When it comes to permalinks, you can’t be too careful. If your site has been online for a while and you’re not using a plain permalink structure, it’s probably best to leave it as it is. But, if that’s not an option and you’re not experienced with redirects, we strongly recommend to hire a professional to setup them properly. That way you will be sure that your users will never stop reaching your content.

White screens or 404 errors

If you’re experiencing problems like a white screen or a 404 error in a page that should be working fine, it may be related to a problem with the rewrite rules in your .htaccess file. If that is the case, flushing them should solve the problem: to do so, just go to Settings → Permalinks and save the current options.

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1. On your WordPress Dashboard, go to Posts → All Posts (or Pages, your custom post type). Find the desired post, and click on its title or its Edit option.
2. Find the Featured Image panel, and click on Set featured image.
3. Choose an image that you’ve already uploaded, or upload a new image.
4. Click Use as featured image to set it as the featured image of the post.

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You can set up a page template in three different ways.

For a single individual page

When adding or editing a page

1. On your WordPress Dashboard, either:
   1. If you’re creating a new page, go to Pages → Add New.
   2. If you’re editing a previously created page, go to Pages → All Pages, find it, and click its title or its Edit option.
2. Find the Page Attributes panel in the right sidebar.
3. Find the Template dropdown, and choose the desired template.
4. Find the Publish panel, and either:
   1. If you’re creating a new page, click on Publish.
   2. If you’re editing a previously created page, click on Update.

When quick-editing a page

1. On your WordPress Dashboard, go to Pages → All Pages, find the desired one, and click its Quick Edit option.
2. Find the Template dropdown, and choose the desired template.
3. Click on Update.

For multiple pages at once

1. On your WordPress Dashboard, go to Pages → All Pages, find the desired ones, and check them using the checkboxes at the left of their titles.
2. Find the Bulk Actions dropdown, choose the Edit option, and click on Apply.
3. Find the Template dropdown, and choose the desired template.
4. Click on Update.

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By default, WordPress shows your most recent posts on the front page of your site.

Our themes come bundled with a special page template for Home Page. In order to use the theme Home Page template as your site home page you’ll need to set a static front page. This “static front page” look is common for those who wish to not have a “blog” look to their site, giving it a more website feel.

• Check how to use the Home Page Template.

Creating a virtual static front page does not require editing or coding of files or templates. Using the default configuration for a “static front page” in WordPress does not remove the sidebar or change the look of the entire site, just the content area.

To create the static front page, go to the WordPress Dashboard

1. Create two WordPress Pages from the “Add New Page”panel. If you will not be using WordPress blogging functionality, you can skip the second page.
   1. Title the first page “Home” (or another name) as your “static” front page.
      • Set the “Home” template to the default template or any custom template. Do not title your template home.php as this could cause a conflict.
      • Add content you would like to see within the content area of the “Home” page.
      • Publish the Page.
   2. Title the second page “Blog” (or you could call it “News”, “Articles”, etc.). This page will be a place-holder for showing the Posts on your site.
      • Do not use a custom Page template for this page! home.php or index.php will be used to generate this page.
      • DO NOT add content to the Blog Page. Leave it blank. Any content here will be ignored — only the Title is used.
      • Publish the Page.
2. Go to Administration → Settings → Reading panel.
   1. Set ‘Front page displays:’ to ‘a static page’ and choose the first page you created above for ‘Front page.’ If your WordPress site will contain a blog section, set ‘Posts page’ to the page you created for this above. Otherwise, leave this blank.
   2. Save changes.
3. Enable ”Permalinks” to show the “page title” in the address, since /index.php?p=423 defeats the purpose of making a static front page.

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Widgets require no code experience or expertise. They can be added, removed, and rearranged on the WordPress Administration Appearance → Widgets panel.

So, in order to start using widgets:

1. Go to Appearance → Widgets.
2. Choose a Widget and either drag it to the sidebar where you wish it to appear, or click the widget, (select a destination sidebar if your theme has more than one) and click the Add Widget button. There might be more than one sidebar option, so begin with the first one. Once in place, WordPress automatically updates the Theme.
3. Preview the site. You should find that the “default” sidebar elements are now gone and only the new addition is visible.
4. Return to the Widgets Panel to continue adding Widgets.
5. To arrange the Widgets within the sidebar or Widget area, click and drag it into place.
6. To customize the Widget features, click the down arrow in the upper right corner to expand the Widget’s interface.
7. To save the Widget’s customization, click Save.
8. To remove the Widget, click Remove or Delete.

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