Twenty Twenty Five

Category: First things first

This is the default category for posts. If you forget to create a category it will go here. If you delete a category, the associated posts will end up here. If you cannot be bothered with categories, you can hid the category in many themes.

  • Adjust the menus or remove them entirely

    Adjust the menus or remove them entirely

    Managing menus is fairly easy, but there are pitfalls due to the flexibility of the options available. You manage menus first by creating a collection or friendly handle/name for your menu. You may want to have a number of menus which you can swap around, perhaps you are doing a major revision to your site. In this case, create a new menu and work on it before you assign it an then publish it.

    You can manage menus by selecting either the customizer option, the Menus option from the dropdown or Dashboard > Appearance > Menus.

    You can access menus in several ways

    The customizer experience may suit you if you want to see what happens on the live site before you commit to a change. In the example below we have named our menu “Mainly” and moved the item Post Types to appear as a drop down to Blocks. We can drag an drop the items and adjust the hierarchy. You can also see that we can select dfferent template positions. Each template will support at least one position, some will support multiple and do magic things with social menus.

    The customizer is handy for preview and for saving drafts

    As stated in other articles you can back out of changes in the customizer or schedule them for later publication or save them as a draft to return to later or copy the link to share with colleagues before committing.

    An important an pwerful feature of the menu navigation tools is that you can easily link to different types of content. A page, to a category or tag (very useful), to a custom link (or a relative #link on a page), an individual post, or even a post format (in this template) or even to another website (but you will be saying goodbye to your visitor – so be wary of offering too many exits). Pretty powerful.

    On the other hand if you have a clear idea of what you want and a largish menu to manage the main Menus management tool may suit better. See below to see that you get a full picture of the options for linking.

    The main menu manager is powerful if you need to manage a complex structure

    Rookie errors:-

    • deleting a page but forgetting to unlink it from the menu
    • creating a “new menu” for every “menu item” and puzzling why they do not appear
    • and not assigning the menu to a specific template position
    • not editing the menu title – say your page title is excessively long
    • having far too many top level items cluttering up your header
    • having far too many sub menus
    • deleting the menu instead of the item (too easy to do, actually)
  • Add a widget in the footer or delete it

    Add a widget in the footer or delete it

    Widgets are blocks that appear outside the content area or a page or post. They include sidebars and footers and in some templates may include multiple positions in the header and above or below it.

    Footers are useful for boring but essential items like a reminder of the legals, privacy, poilcies, social links, basically the who the hell you are guff, how to get in touch and your address if it is relevant (if you are a trading body, incorporated as a business or charity this is essential). In some websites they will contain a so called call to action, to sign up to a newsletter or join or donate. They are powerful because they appear on all pages including post pages, so important stuff doesn’t have to be repeated.

    As with menus, there is a freestanding view which we have re-enabled as this has been withdrawn in recent updates an a customizer view. In the latter you just click on the desired element and it will appear below in the selected position (the footer in the example).

    The customizer widget view

    To move elements around you simply drag and drop them. In the customizer remember to Publish your changes. In the non preview mode remember to click Done or Save, as appropriate.

    Manage widgets without preview

    Rookie errors:-

    • Adding the same footer content to the bottom of your page or post, when you can do the very same thing with the footer widget once
    • Using the backspace to go back to the previous page – annoyingly you will lose your edits!
    • Leaving default widgets on your website with the placeholder content possibly advertising someone else’s creative business
    • Cluttering the section with too much guff
  • Before you make your site live (no one will find you unless they have the link otherwise) …

    Before you make your site live (no one will find you unless they have the link otherwise) …

    In our setup the default is to discourage search engines. This is to protect you from accidentally publishing your experimental doodles. In our experience many site owners can take many weeks, months, sometimes years to begin work and then finish their site.

    For your sanity we recommend you make sure you visit the settings page Dashboard > Settings > Reading and scroll to the bottom, where you will see the options available.

    Whilst it is up to the discretion of search engines to respect the discourage notice, the main ones do. If they find your page they will display a notice that robots.txt has denied them access. If your site has mission critical information that must not be made public i.e. is embargoed you should tighten the options to the users of the website only or to admins only.

    Once your site is live – search engines will start to add pages to the index

    Rookie errors:-

    • Coming soon pages that never come anytime soon – good idea if part of a concerted plan to go live and you need to build a bit of momentum, collect email addresses etc
    • Under construction pages – this is very 1990s – the modern website allows you to make everything draft – better not to publish at all or the search engine will remember your old content for much longer than is ever desirable
    • Forgetting to change the discourage search engines notice for months and months thereby letting the search engine forget about you entirely …
    • Forgetting to delete the placeholder content … images, pages and posts will be viewable and confuse your audience