A menu is its own thing

It would be possible to generate navigation automatically from the page tree. Core dna deliberately does not. A menu is a separate record containing a list of menu elements, each pointing at wherever you want.

The cost is that adding a page does not add it to the menu. The benefit is everything else:

  • Navigation labels can be shorter than page titles. A page called "Professional services and consulting" can appear in the menu as "Services".
  • A menu can point at an external site, an anchor within a page, or a documentation section — not just pages.
  • Pages can exist outside the navigation entirely, which is what you want for campaign landing pages.
  • The order in the menu reflects importance, not the structure of the tree.

Menu elements

Each element has a label, a target and a position. Elements can nest to produce dropdowns, though nesting more than two levels deep tends to produce navigation nobody can use on a phone.

Multiple menus

Most sites have several: a main navigation, a footer menu, sometimes a utility menu. They are independent records, so a link can appear in one and not the others, and the footer can be far more comprehensive than the header without cluttering it.

The maintenance trap

Because menus are manual, they drift. Two habits prevent most of it:

  1. When you unpublish or delete a page, check the menus in the same sitting. A menu item pointing at a removed page is a link straight to a 404.
  2. When you change a page's URL, update the menu element too — or better, add a redirect so both keep working.

What good navigation looks like

Keep the top level short: five to seven items is the practical limit before people stop reading and start scanning. Label items with the words visitors would use, not internal department names.