Did you know that with WordPress we can make our own navigation menus?

This is one of my favourite things in WordPress now; before we would have to add plugins to specify which pages and links we wanted to include. Now it is delightfully simple for most of us.

Note: some themes do not allow for this new functionality, sadly. You can work around that with whatever your theme provides and/or make use of the trusty Exclude Pages and Page Links To plugins

WordPress 3.x includes the option to build a custom menu – you can include links to external sites, individual posts, categories, even tags – anything with a link, so pretty much all you could want to include in your navigation.

Here’s how:

Go to Appearance, Menus

Give your menu a name, such as “main” or “primary” and click Create Menu.

Select the Theme Location – sometimes you get to choose a Primary or Secondary Navigation Menu. And Save

Then you want to select your Pages – to start with go to the View All tab, select the pages you want to include in the menu and then click the Add to Menu button.

You’ll see that you can also view the pages in the Most Recent tab too, plus you can Search – if you’ve lots of pages.

 You can also “Automatically add new top-level pages” (tick at the top there, beside your Menu Name box).

Save Menu (wise to do this each time you add something, I suggest ).

Scroll down a tad and you can see a box for Custom Links – here you can add links to other websites!

Below this again you have the options to add individual blog Posts (again, view by Most Recent or All, or Search), Categories, and Post Tags.

What more could you possibly want when creating a custom menu?

Well being able to change the title would be good. And you can!

Once you have all the links to pages, websites, posts, etc in place – then you put them in the order you want.

Within your menu area, on the right, you’ll find that you can pick up, drag and drop each menu item, shuffling and arranging them to suit you. In this way you can also next the items too. If this doesn’t make sense, watch the video below to see.

If you want the different wording for any items, you can rename them. Click the wee down arrow beside the item you want to rename – a box will show up in which you can change the Navigation Label – this is one you just do and then Save Menu.

And there you are – a really neat way to create your own navigation menu in WordPress.