A BlueHost WordPress Tutorial: Page and Blog Post Navigation with Menu Configuration

Find below the listing of all blog categories on The StatisticsMatrix web site. For the StatisticsMatrix website, categories are assigned to blog posts. Categories are not assigned to web pages. A blog post can be listed in multiple categories. As well, each blog category has a home page. On the blog category home page you will find a short form listing of all the blogs in that category. You can scroll down the blog category page and then click on the blog post you want to read.

One of the first and most important tasks to do when you make your WordPress blog is to create your blog navigation. The reason this is so important is that search engines key off your blog navigation categories. Its much less time consuming for a search engine to just look at the navigation categories and index those, as opposed to reading every word on the blog.

All of this requires you first determine your blog post categories, in this case Poster Products, Press Releases, Statistics, etc., and then assign a category to each post. Although a relatively simple task, complicating the matter is the fact that different hosting providers provide different ways to accomplish this. As well, updates are often not well documented. For this example, I used the WordPress blog and interface that Bluehost.com offers. Bluehost is one of the leading WordPress Internet Service Providers.

The blog navigation created above includes five categories: Artificial Intelligence, Poster Products, Press Releases, Statistics and Uncategorized. Click any of the categories and you will go to a blog page that includes all the blogs written to date that have been categorized with the associated category.

It didn’t take long to do, but it was a bit of an effort to find the menus that allowed it to be done. The first step in the process was to go to the administrators dashboard. There one must look under the Posts menu, the left-hand side bar and select Categories, as shown below.

Select Posts then Select Categories

Selecting categories will bring you to the categories fill in form, shown below

Categories Can be Easily Assigned with the Add New Category Form

As can be seen in the Add New Category form above, one can add new categories on the left hand side of the form. The categories that I have already added can be seen on the right. You can delete or edit your category any time after you create it. Its a simple matter to add a new category. Type in the name you want for the category in the Name box. You will also want to add a slug. the slug will be appended to the blog post URL. This is important. Search engines index a site with its slug and also its category. If neither are in place, your site will not be indexed by the search engine. Search engines are busy bees, they don’t have much time to go through all your posts and look at every word, more so determine what category your post should be in. As a general rule of thumb you want your categories to broadly reflect the topic your blog covers. In this case I still have some work to do, my goal at first was just to get the blog navigation running. Below I added a new category for my Physics blogs. Although I haven’t posted a Physics blog, I plan to put one up soon. For this blog, I named the slug physics-rotational-kinematics. As you might guess, I plan to write Physics posts on rotational kinematics.

Adding a Physics Category and a Slug Name

The next step, at least on the Bluehost WordPress hosting site, is to scroll down and submit the category. To do this, click the Add New Category button, as shown below. Once you click Add New Category the Physics category will be added to the categories list.

There is still one more button to click. You will have to scroll down and click the Apply button.

To Update Your Category List The Final Step is to Click the Apply Button at the bottom of the Category List

Now that the step is completed, create some blogs and assign them a category that is in the category list. To do this, view your blog list, that is select All Posts on your blog Administrator’s panel and take a look at the list view of your blog. My blog list is shown below. Here I am viewing a blog post I already assigned a category to. If you have not assigned a category to a post, the third column, the category column, will be empty. Clicking Quick Edit will allow you to type in a new category or change the existing category.

Scroll Down the Post List, Hover Beneath the Title, Select Quick Edit, then Change or Add a Post Category

The Final Step

After all that, create a WordPress page to put your Category Menu on. This is easily done on the Bluehost host, you select New Page. Once on your new page, add a title and then toggle the Block Inserter. It is located on the left hand corner, as shown below, the blue plus sign.

Toggle the Block Inserter to View the Different Blocks You Can Insert

Click the blue Block Inserter icon to show the list of blocks you can select. You are looking for the Categories block. Type Categories in the Block Inserter search box to find it quicker as shown below.

Use the Block Inserter Search Box to Locate Post Categories

Now all you have to do is drag the Categories icon to the place you want to place it on your page. Then you are done. For clarity, I have dragged the Post Categories Icon so that it is positioned just below this paragraph.

So it[s done, and now, for this page, I have two Post Category Navigation bars, one at the very beginning of this page and one here at the bottom.

You still might have questions. There are lots of different WordPress blocks to learn about, most are best learned by trial and error. The one question that comes to my mind is if the Categories block can be put on each of the blog category pages.

But What About the Horizontal Navigation Bar

I selected the Sinatra theme for the StatisticsMatrix. The Sinatra theme provides by default a standardized blog template and a page template. I can customize the horizontal navigation bar on the web site. To do this, select the appearance option on the web site dashboard then select the menu option from the slide out vertical menu that appears. Find below, what the StatisticsMatrix menu dashboard looks like:

The StatisticsMatrix menu dashboard shows that there are both pages and categories on the horizontal navigation bar

As you can see on the above figure, you can easily add pages to the horizontal menu bar. From the appearance menu dashboard there is also a categories option. Once the categories item is selected you can then place a blog category on the horizontal navigation menu bar. As shown above there are both page titles and blog categories (titles) listed in the menu. You can also drag a page title or a blog category to reposition it to the left or right. As well, you can create a submenu below each horizontal navigation bar menu option. Here, I selectedthe CodeMatrix Blog category. As one can plainly see

Looking at the figure below, you can see the actual horizontal navigation bar that results from the above menu page and blog category selections and positioning: About, Document Automation, CodeMatrix, The DevOps Matrix. What you will also notice is that the CodeMatrix menu option was selected. The endpoint is the home page for the CodeMatrix blog category.

If you scroll down on the CodeMatrix blog category home page (which is a page and not a blog post), you will see the blog posts that have been posted in the CodeMatrix category, as shown in the figure below. You will also notice on the right-hand side a listing of all blog categories.

Clicking the read more option for the JavaScript Stacks blog, the actual blog post appears as shown below: As can be seen, the blog post doesn’t have any blog category navigation. You can click on the CodeMatrix button and go back to the CodeMatrix Blog Home Page. On the other hand, the horizontal navigation menu bar is still there.

This does pose the question as to how to include a blog category menu on a blog post. Another question is what pages and blog category home pages should be placed on the horizontal menu bar. WordPress posts and pages on BlueHost are much easier to edit when one uses the horizontal menu bar and the blog category lists when compared to using the BlueHost WordPress dashboard is one consideration.