Structuring a Menu

You can create a hierachical menu structure where an item has several children and these in turn can have children. The admin menu and the main menu are like this but there is a subtle difference. In the admin menu, each parent item links to a page in addition to all its children linking to pages. Normal desktop applications do not do this. In my experience, people do not expect a menu item with children to also link to content and they are thus likely to overlook its information. For that reason, the main menu does not link parent items to pages, they merely serve as a path to child items. It will be very confusing for users if the menus behave inconsistently across the site so please follow the current model unless we are agreed to change it.

  1. You must be logged in before you can make changes to the website.
  2. Goto Structure> Menus in the Admin menu (the black bar at the top of the screen).
  3. Select the menu you wish to alter. Main menu is the one for the general section of the website which appears in the horizontal bar below the header. There are also menus for each scheme subsection, named according to the scheme. There are other menus in the list which you should not edit.
  4. You are presented with a list of the items in the menu, each of which has a 4-way arrow beside it. You can drag menu items to wherever you want them in the list, either up and down to reorder of left and right to make parents and children.
  5. Click Add link to create a new item or Edit to alter an item.
  6. When adding or editing a link there are only two things you need to set
    1. Menu link title. These are the words that appear in the menu. Keep it short so it is quick to use.
    2. Path. The url of the page to link to. If this is a parent item it should be set to <nolink>. If this is an item with no children then it should be the path to the page. You can leave off the www.coleoptera.org.uk/ and just enter the path within the website.
  7. Always click the Save button after making changes.