Today we’re going to look at main menus and footer menus.
What they are, what they should include, and how to edit them to fit your business.
Menus are a group of clickable links that help customers navigate through your store’s
main pages and collections.
Each of these clickable links are called a “menu item”.
Most online stores have a main menu at the top or side of the web page.
The placement and style of your menu is determined by your store’s theme.
Before you decide on a theme, make sure that theme’s style of menu will work well for
your business.
A good main menu makes it easy for customers to browse and find what they’re looking
for.
Some menu items you might want to include in your main menu are: product collections,
your “about us” page and your blog page.
If you have a lot of products, consider breaking them up into multiple menu items.
For example Aly Athletics has menu items for new products, products that are on sale, apparel
products, accessories, and equipment.
Footer menus appear at the bottom of your online store.
These menus have menu items that link to information about your business.
For example, frequently asked questions, shipping and refund policies, and contact information
are great to have in your footer menu.
Now that we know which items should go in main and footer menus, it’s time to start
editing your menu.
Let’s begin by adding a new menu item to the main menu.
In the Shopify admin, click Online Store, then Navigation.
From the Menus section, click Main menu, or Footer menu.
In this tutorial, we’ll be working with the main menu.
But, you’ll be able to use the same instructions for the footer menu as well.
Here is the main menu for Aly Athletics.
As you can see the menu items that you add to the Menu Items section, will appear in
your store’s main menu.
If you're just getting started with menus, then your main menu will already have two
default menu items.
The first is titled Home.
This links to your store's homepage.
The second is titled Catalog.
When you click Catalog, you go to a page that lists all of your products.
The footer menu has only one default menu item, called Search.
It links to the search bar for your store.
To add a new menu item click Add Menu Item.
Type in the name for your menu item.
For this example I’m going to type in Athletic Accessories.
After you name the menu item, click the Link text field.
Select the pre-existing page or collection that you want the menu item to link to.
If you don’t have any pages or collections created yet, then check out the links in the
description for videos on those topics.
In some cases, you may not want your menu item to link to anything.
For example, if you’re just creating a menu item for the purpose of having other dropdown
menu items under it.
If you want to create a menu item that doesn’t link anywhere, then in the Link field, type
the # key and select the # key from the results.
This will prevent the menu item from linking anywhere.
For this example menu item, I’m going to select the Athletic Accessories collection
as the link.
After you're done, click Add.
You should now see the new menu item in the Menu items section.
If you want to see what the menu now looks like, click Save.
Then click the eye icon next to Online Store to see it on your home page.
Now, if I click on Athletic Accessories, it takes me to the athletic accessories collection
page.
It’s also possible to create sub categories in your menus, using drop-down menu items.
Watch the next video in this series to learn how to create dropdown menus.
You can also edit menu items that already exist.
To do this, click the Edit button next to the menu item.
I’m going to rename my catalog menu item to “All products”.
To finish, click Apply Changes.
You can change the order of your menu items by clicking and dragging the six dot icon
next to the menu item name.
If you want to delete one of the menu items, then click the Delete button next to the menu
item, and then click Remove from the pop-up window.
Click Save after you make changes to your menu, and you’ll see those changes reflected
on your online store.
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