The WordPress Web publishing system provides a lot of scope in how your web content is presented due to its dynamic nature i.e. its use of php and MySQL. WordPress gives the user a particularly large amount of scope in what is published and how e.g. as pages or posts. This full CMS is also made relatively easy to use with its clear internal layout and with the help of the many plugins which help your website to achieve fantastic functionality with little need for specialist coding knowledge from yourself.

Navigation in WordPress

New visitors to your website will be unlikely to know the size and scope of your website, exactly where they are within your website when they arrive (if not at the home page), or exactly how they can find what they’re looking for. It’s therefore the job of your website navigation system to ‘clearly’ show them how to move around within your website, to let them know exactly where they are at any one time, and to psychologically provide something to ‘cling on to’.

One convention that web users are familiar with is that main navigation links for a website can be found on the left hand side of a web page (in the ‘sidebar’) and the foot of a web page. For this reason these 2 ‘themes’ come as standard with WordPress. ‘Themes’ could be broadly described as groups of instructions which make up a particular layout / look / function for something. One ‘theme’ is produced in the WordPress system by grouping several different ‘template tags’ (code commands) together to achieve the required layout / look / function. Internally the way WordPress creates your web pages involves calling up the different parts of pages from many different places (unlike static html pages). This additional ‘complication’ in the making of web pages can be mitigated by the use of the plugins and/or in the case of the navigation links in the website by making some small changes to some template tags.

Types of Navigation Links in WordPress

WordPress typically uses a variety of methods to display and link to content in websites such as ‘Pages’ (rather than Posts), Categories, Links, and Archives – where content is arranged and linked to in date from (the most recent first). The ‘Categories’ and ‘Archives’ are likely to be more related to a ‘Blog’ format rather than a typical website format, although you may want to include a blog in your website (using posts which are archived and can be linked to by category).

WordPress also allows you as the Administrator of your website to control the links you see in the admin section of your website i.e. the Admin and Meta links.

Popular Navigation Menus in WordPress

It often helps website visitors if you stick to widely recognised conventions when it comes to links and navigation i.e. having a clear left hand side vertical, and perhaps a horizontal menu at the foot (or at the top of the page). An important thing to remember about WordPress is that a ‘list’ of links as far as WordPress is concerned is a vertical rather than horizontal thing – each item in the list has its own line. Therefore to create a row of horizontal links e.g. at the foot of a page, will require the use of the HTML list feature and some changes. For example you could use CSS to ‘style’ the list so that it runs on one horizontal line, and you can augment it using PHP. It’s important to remember also not to put too many links in a horizontal menu as it could cause layout issues in the page.

A default list in WordPress v1.2 for example will include an image, a bullet, an indent and an underline. If you want to clean up and customise the appearance of these links you can make changes to the appropriate style-sheet to do so.

Linking to Page in WordPress

Linking to specific named page in WordPress basically means the use of ‘permalinks (controlled by the ‘get_permalink()’ template tag). Remember that template tags are the code instructions that together make up a ‘Theme’ for something in WordPress.

More about Linking and Changing Template Tags

The template tags which create and control your navigation links are found in the default Themes sidebar. When ‘Pages’ were introduced to WordPress it allowed us to build our navigation menus in a way that we were familiar to seeing in ‘websites’ (rather than blogs) e.g. with links to an About Us, Contact, Products page etc. Making changes to the ‘wp_list_pages()’ template tag allows you to feature links to your most important pages in the sidebar for example, and control how long or short this list is. Similarly, if using ‘categories’ in your navigation linking system you can make changes to the ‘wp_list-categories()’ template tag to apply limits to the categories that are displayed to website users. If ‘Archives’ are used, you can customise the ‘wp_get_archives()’ template tag e.g. to show just the most recent ones (in a specified period).

In the ‘Administration’ and ‘Links’ section of WordPress you can control the display of external links on your website.

Styling Your Links

WordPress is very flexible in ‘styling’ links e.g. how they appear – colours, font / font side, bold, dynamic highlighting etc. Plugins are available to help you, and there is also the Pages sidebar widget.