Full Video Transcript
Hey y’all – Welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton and today we are continuing in our series on WordPress Blogs – specifically talking about things to improve your blog.
Last week we spoke briefly on Categories vs. Tags, and this week we’re talking about how to set up a custom categories menu inside of your WordPress website. So by default – if we check out WebTegrity’s website here – by default you see that on tutorials – which is our blog you get to see on the right side here a widget box that has a categories menu, and this lists out my categories that I’ve created, as well as had content inside of – in alphabetical order. Okay?
What if though – because WordPress Wednesday is our big topic – What if I wanted that at the top? Or what if I wanted only a select few of these in a specific menu area? Well – there is a way to do that. It’s just not something by default that’s sitting here though. So a couple of steps and I’m going to show you how to do that right now.
You would pop over to your widgets area. In Appearance >>> go to widgets. And that’s where you would find this Categories option here.
If you were to drag that over and drop that in which is what we’ve done inside of our blog sidebar here – you see Categories right here. And we just said on top of it – Select a Topic So that’s the title of this widget, and of course, this is how that displays down the right side bar right now in alphabetical order.
But again if I wanted something to have a specific list of topics, and not have all of them, or have them in a different order – how would I do that? Well now you’d go to Appearance >> Menus. Popping over here allows us to create a custom menu. And you would just click “Create new menu” You would give it a title of “Blog Categories,” or whatever you’d like to title it just so that you know how to assign this. Of course this is not our primary menu. We want to be able to put this in our sidebar, or perhaps even in our footer area, or some other area other than our primary menu -So we would leave this unchecked.
But in order to actually add categories over here we don’t want pages. So we’re going to zip that up. We actually want something called “Categories.” And if you don’t see this option sitting here on the left side whenever you go into menus what you want to do is pop right up here to screen options. Open this little drawer and you should have an option to check “Categories.” Be sure this little box is checked and you can zip that drawer back up and now. You’ll have access to any of your categories.
So you can click “View All” and then choose the exact categories that you’d want and I can say – From Students, Business Tips, Social Media Marketing, and WordPress Wednesday. Let’s just add those few. I’d select them and click add to menu. They pop over here and, of course, we can drag and drop these anyway we want. So, I’m going to drag WordPress Wednesday up to the top – From Students at the bottom and Social Media Marketing Tips there. That’s the order I’d like them in. And I’m going to go ahead and click “Save Menu.”
Now what this has done for me is created the list of links that point directly to the category, right? But now I have to assign it. Now I have to tell our website where to display this set of links that I’ve put together, that WordPress calls a menu. So what I’m going to do is pop back over to Appearance >> Widgets and go into my blog sidebar. Open this little drawer up here Blog Sidebar. I’m going to go ahead and delete for now our categories list that I had there, and I want to select a custom menu and drop it in that same spot. And I’m going to give it the same title “Select a Topic.” But now from the dropdown – I’m going to be able to choose the menu that I just created, and that was Blog Categories and click save.
Now when I come back to the front side of my website and click refresh – I should have a shorter menu that appears over here on the right side – Let me scroll down – Select a Topic – here we go WordPress Wednesday, Social Media Marketing, Business Tips, and From Students. Now I want you to note that it completely changed the way this looks. And that’s because my stylesheet assigned something totally different to a menu in the right side, and that can be the case inside of your theme as well. So I wanted to leave this option for you to see what could happen if your setting something like this up inside of your WordPress website.
One more quick tip before I run away – What if I wanted to link up in the top? What if I wanted to link “tutorials” – this link right here to one of specific category? How would I do that?
Let’s pop back over to our (umm – I’m going to delete that for now really quickly and throw back over my categories list – just because I’m working on a live website right now) LAUGH So Select a Topic – there we go and click save. So what you do is pop back over to your Themes and you’re going to go back to Menus – Appearance >>> Menus is where we want to go and inside of our Appearance >> Menus you want to be sure that you’re messing around with your main menu – your primary menu – your main menu bar, if that’s the area you want to change, right?
So this is my main menu and I want to change this from saying Tutorials and pointing to just my generic blog, you know that kind of catches all of my topics and I want to point that specifically to WordPress Wednesday or maybe I want a dropdown that points to one specific category. This is how you would do that.
So – Our tutorials right now. You see here – it points to a page. But if I wanted it to point specifically to a category – that’s how I would choose it.
I would come to categories and choose WordPress Wednesday and click add to menu. Now if I wanted to get fancy with this, and it not say “WordPress Wednesday” because I think that’s just too long. I could go ahead and back out the navigation label and say “Tutorials” on here – Zip that up.
Now notice it says category. So I can actually remove this one right here that said page. And now this is pointing specifically to one singular category for WordPress Wednesday. That’s the way you do that.
If you’re interested more in learning how to manipulate different things here inside of a menu, I’m going to put right here – just below this and in the description box below a link over to a bunch of videos that I’ve created – a whole playlist on how to make changes to your WordPress menus. It’s very important to understand the power behind this really cool drag and drop environment.
There are so many options to do cool stuff inside of here for SEO for just customizing a really great experience for your users and dropdown options – all sorts of things. How do you set one to where it opens in a new window whenever you click on the link, and it opens in a new window? I’ll show you how to do it inside this playlist.
I hope you’re having a great WordPress Wednesday! Stick around & be sure to Subscribe because next week we’re going to do it all over again – more stuff about WordPress blogs.
Bye, Y’all
