Main Navigation (menu)

Your main navigation (menu) one way people will navigate your site. It includes the main links in the header and secondary and tertiary links in the sidebar or drop-down menus.

Stanford Sites are built to use one single menu tree for navigation. If desired, site managers can enable a drop-down main menu instead, allowing visitors easy access to all sections and pages from anywhere on the site. 

In most cases, you will want to follow the directions for adding a page to your navigation while editing the page itself. For those instructions, see Add a Page to Main Navigation.

Adding a custom item to Main Navigation:

1. In the administrative toolbar, hover over Structure > Menus > Main navigation, and click on Add link

2. In the Menu link title field, add the label for the menu item (e.g. “News”).
3. In the Link field, add “/news”. *Note: Do not include source parameters when pasting URLs into news links.
4. Check the Enabled box so that the menu item will be visible/enabled.
5. In the Description field, add a basic description (e.g. “News listings”)
6. In the Parent link field, select <Main navigation>
7. In the Menu Link Weight field, you can reorder your main menu items by clicking the icon next to each item name, and dragging and dropping to your desired order.
8. Click Save.

Add topics to the menu

Many of the content types on your site, such as news, events, people, and publications, have a list page with a Topics menu or Filter by menu. By default the pages on these menus do not display in the dropdown menus or show an active menu item. This can be remedied by adding each topic page to the main menu or appropriate submenu:

1. Go to the page and get the URL for the topic page. It should look something like <site-name>/people/faculty
2. Follow the directions to Add item to Main Navigation with these changes:
   1. For the Menu link title use the original topic name, i.e., Faculty
   2. For the Link field, add the URL minus the site name, i.e., /people/faculty
   3. For the Parent link field, select the appropriate parent, i.e. People

Best practices 

• Keep the items within your main navigation specific and succinct.
• Use main navigation menu items to navigate to pages within the current site. If you must link to a different website, we recommend you do so in content, not in your navigation.

Read 5 Steps for Designing Modern Website Navigation to support effective communication and an optimal user experience.