Today is going to your first introduction to proper organization on your website. One thing that we always need to remember is that we are building our websites for PEOPLE, and our visitors and how someone would view our content and our navigation is what should dictate how we present our content.

In other words, if your website is difficult to navigate, people simply won't. The may read your content, and then just move onto another website. You can increase your website "page views" and overall website revenue if you understand proper navigiation

Introducing "Custom" Menus in Wordpress.

The default Wordpress menus work in very strange ways and can be quite awkward. Typically when you add a page, it automatically goes to the main menu. A post, will go to the homepage blog roll (not the main menu).

As a website owner, you want FULL control of your navigation as your theme by default won't do a very good job of this. Fortunately, it is quite straightforward to create Custom Menus.

Navigation is going to be a critical element to your user experience moving forward and will impact your rankings (as Google ranks sites with proper navigation better), so this is an important step here.

I have created a"Creating Custom Menus, Navigation, & Widgets" video walking you through the process of creating custom menus. You can check it out below.

Task 1: Create a Menu

There are a few simple steps to creating a custom menu. The first thing you need to understand is where to find the Menu management section within your Wordpress admin area.

Under the Appearance, click the Menus sub heading.

This will take you to the custom menu creator. Under the left tabs, you are going to see a Pages section. Posts are not added to your navigation by default, so you are going to need to click the Posts tab and it will show a list of your Posts.

In this case, we have only create the About Me page. Click the check box associated with that, and then click the Add to Menu.

**Note: Most themes by default will add Pages to the top menu, but if you don't see your Privacy Policy within the Menu Structure section, you will need to add that.

Your About Me page has now been added to your menu structure.

Once added to your Menu Structure, you can reorganize your menu in any way you like, i this case I am going to add my About Kyle pager above the Privacy Policy, which is going to put it to the "left" of this within the live menu on my website.

Under Menu Settings, I am also going to make the Display location, Primary Menu.

Check this box as this will put this menu as your main navigation at the top of your page. Upon doing this, click the "Save Menu" button and you are set.

For example purposes, here is what my live website looks like with my newly updated menu.

We are all set here. You have accomplished A LOT in this lesson alone. You have not only set up your initial content framework on your website, you also have your initial navigation set out.

Nice work!