How to Attach Categories To Your Menus On Wordpress

bymerissawrite

237 followers

11 years ago

Over the past couple of weeks, I have not been on WA much. But I have been working on building my website. My niche is games, crafts and activities for kids and last week I was exploring ways to attract my target audience, which is parents of preschoolers and younger children.

Five months ago (in September) I spent three hours trying to figure out how to attach certain categories to different menu items, but attaching a wordpress page was as close as I could get. Last week, while my main goal was simply to optimize my website for the search engines, I "accidentally" discovered how to do exactly what I spent so much time trying to do in September. I was pleased, but also somewhat annoyed with myself at how easy it was. I had a very hard time figuring out how to do this by goggling tutorials as they were often very confusing.

If you are like me, you want each menu item to take your reader to all the blog posts that are in only certain categories. For example, I wanted all my craft posts to show up when a visitor clicked on the menu item called "Crafts."

So even though I can not take screen shots with my computer for this post, I am going to give a short overview about how I did it. But keep in mind that some Wordpress layouts work a little bit differently. So without screen shots, I hope this makes sense...

1. On your Dashboard under Appearance, click on the Menus button.

2. Give your menu a name; I called mine "main."

3. In the side bar, you will see the option to add either Pages, Links or Categories to your menu. Click on the down arrow for the categories section and add whichever type of posts you want your menu item to bring up.

4. Now make sure that each of your blog posts are placed in the relevant category.

I feel silly that I did not figure this out sooner, but hey, it is a funny story when you think about it. Especially since this is such a basic task. But I like the way it makes my website feel more professional. You can also add "sub- menus" by dragging the menu item to the side a little bit.

Let me know if you figure it out. And if you figured this out a long time ago, feel free to sacarstically applaud me and my new found talent. Lol.