Suggestions to Set up Your Website

When creating your website, it is important to create it in the most user friendly and readable way possible. I am going to go over some suggestions that I think everyone here can benefit from.

I have found that it is better to use pages only for the important pages of your website such as your About Me page, Privacy Policy and Contact page as this is all static content. In regards to your Privacy Policy page keep it hidden from the main menu in the header of your site and use the pages widget to have your Privacy Policy page in the sidebar. This will give your site a better feel and cleaner look.

Whatever categories you are going to have on your site should be visible in the header as the main menu. You can accomplish this by going to menu under appearance and creating a new menu. When creating your menu add your important pages to the menu except for the privacy policy.

To add your main category headings to the menu and not have the heading linking to anywhere. Add a link for each category. In the website address put a hash tag(#) instead of a website address and then add the custom link to the menu. This will cause the link to do nothing (not even refresh the page). For the title put the category name you want to display in the main menu.

Having your website setup with this type of framework gives you much more control over displaying your website content. I noticed a lot of people use pages rather than blog posts. You should only use pages when the content doesn't change.

You can assign your blog posts to a category to make your blog posts easier for a reader to find. You can then go to your menu that you created, add the categories to that menu and put them as a sub-menu item of your main menu headings (the custom links). To do this just go to appearance->menu, go to categories, check all the categories you wish to add to the menu and move them under the appropriate custom link ensuring they are offset as shown in the inserted image.

You can place your privacy policy along with all the other pages in your sidebar by going to appearance->widgets, click on the pages widget, ensure that sidebar is checked, click add and then give your widget a title such as Important Pages.

Another suggestion for your sidebar is to place your recent posts there using the widget for recent posts, along with archives and categories to help readers easier navigate your site. With archives and categories I would suggest to use a drop down menu configuration as this gives your site a cleaner look.

I hope these suggestions will be helpful when creating your sites. If you have any questions or comments feel free to drop me a line.

Allen