In our ongoing exercise to learn the nuts and bolts of a magazine style WordPress theme, we examine what has become by far the most ignored part of a theme design, the navigation menu.

As important as they are, they are often found floating in the header or worse the sidebar and almost never used to its fullest. Today we will attempt to change that. We are dedicating the next few sections just to discuss navigation menus, its varied uses, and the various methods of using it. So why wait, let’s get started.

Why are Navigation Menus Important?

There are three important roles of navigation menus, they are listed below in no particular order:

• It acts as the gateway to sections of the site you want your visitors/users to explore
• When designed correctly, it aids as a visual sitemap
• When used correctly, it enhances usability of your site and helps in SEO

How are Navigation Menus in Magazine Style Themes Different from Regular Themes?

If you notice closely, most regular themes have pages listed in blocks in the header or the sidebar and call it navigation. For all practical purpose, it works, and we are all complacent with it. In WordPress, there are numerous pages that are dynamically created like the archives, category pages, paginated pages, search pages and so on that are traditionally are not considered pages when you create a list using the template tag such as the one below:

	<?php wp_list_pages('sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li='); ?>

In fact, the above tag does not display any child pages! So how do overcome this limitation?