How to Edit the Menus at Your Free Website

Hello, it’s Lesley here again from FreeWebsiteDesign.co.nz, a project brought to you by Aliarts Website Marketing. Welcome back to tutorial 7 in the series, how to set up your navigation menu with the NAVT lists.

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Can’t watch video? Here is a transcript of the audio:

In this tutorial, we will go through what you need to do if you would like your page to appear in the side menu, rather than the top menu. This is where the page title will apear as default, unless you would like it otherwise.

So let’s go ahead and log into our backend just as before. Once again, let’s visit the website now, by right clicking on visit site, and selecting open in new tab.

As an example, say you wanted to move this page we have titled ‘Blue Widgets’ up here in the top menu, down here into the side menu. We would do this with the NAVT Lists.

First of all, we would go to the post we wish to move to the side menu, and click to edit. As I mentioned in the Add Pages tutorial, if you don’t want this page to appear in the top menu, then you would untick ‘Include this page in user menus.’ You would then click ‘Update Page.’ You can now see does page would not appear in your top menu at all.

You are now able to add it to the side menu using the NAVT lists. Scroll down the dashboard menu until you see the NAVT lists link. Click this link and your Navigation Management will appear.

Now at first this may all seem a little daunting, but this is by far the best way to manage your navigation, adding even more elements to be able to pack your keywords into for the search engines to pick up. This is extremely powerful when it comes to potential customers finding you when they search for the keywords you use in these titles.

So let me show you how easy it is to add your pages to your side navigation menu.

You will see here in the sidebar at your website, we have set you up with two different menus, one for your pages, and one for your posts. Your posts menu is organised into categories. You may remember in the add new posts tutorial, we added the new post to the Latest News Category, which means these posts appear in a list in your posts menu. You can add unlimited categories to this menu as your website grows. But more about this in the add new categories tutorial coming up in the series.

What we are concentrating on here today is adding new pages to your side menu. The pages are not organised into categories, these are stand alone web pages, which can be added as seperate links in either your top or your side navigation menu.

To move the page into the side navigation, you need to find the page you have just added. If you remember from the last tutorial, this was the Amazing Blue Widgets page. To add this to your side menu, you simply click on the page name here in the pages menu of the NAVT lists. This will then appear in your assets area, ready to be moved into your menu.

Once you have moved the post by clicking on it once, hover over the top left hand corner of the page in the assets menu. Your cursor should turn into a cross. You are then able to click, drag and drop your new page into your side navigation menu.

As soon as you have completed this, you can refresh your website and view the changes you have made. You will now see the post does not appear in the top menu, but now appears in your sidebar menu.

You are now able to move any of these pages and posts around in the same way, by simply hovering, dragging, and dropping your posts and pages around. Want everything in the same menu? Simply drop all your pages and posts into the same menu. The other menu will stay dormant, until you wish to drop anything into it. Wish to change to titles that appear for any of your pages or posts? Simply click on the name of the page or post, it will open, and you are able to easily change titles in the dropdown box.

Just a quick note here. We have automatically set you up with two seperate menus to play with. You can change the names and drag and drop pages and posts within these two menus as you see fit.
Say you wanted to add a new group to your sidemenu however, please simply let us know and we will create a new menu for you. You can have as many as you like to add to, with as many categories as it takes to get your message across. However, this is something that is done in the backend, by us.

To save confusion (and accidents), you have been set up as an editor of your website, so you have all the permissions you need to do everything you have been shown in the previous tutorials. There are a few things in the backend only we have access to, just in case anything should go wrong with options that are not properly understood. With the permissions you have, you really can’t break anything we can’t fix (within reason!), unless you delete all your text, in which case you are on your own to add it all in again! But, this is highly unlikely.

So go ahead and edit your website, add to it, move your menus around and have some fun with it. Anything else you wish to do that there is no tutorial for, or you would like to add but can’t see how, please feel free to let me know, and I’ll get right onto it for you.

So there we have it. All you need to know to move around and add to your navigation menus. If any of this is unclear, or you need to go through it with me, please feel free to let me know on any of the numbers at www.FreeWebsiteDesign.co.nz, or Aliarts.co.nz.

Thanks again, and I’ll see you in tutorial 8.