Add a category pull down button to the top of the screen (header).
One thing that really bugs me about people’s blogs is that they have some information on the right-hand side of the page (called a sidebar). The problem is that there usually isn’t really that much information and so it squishes all of the blog content to the left to make room for this tiny little piece of information and the rest of the article has to suffer by having blank space on the right-hand margin. I have struggled with ways to get rid of this, and I am really going to need my users to be able to select categories within my blog. Using the widget manipulation I was able to get the category button to the bottom of the screen. But what I really need is a pulldown menu that has my categories in it embedded within the header. Then if I remove the social links and the search bar, I will have cleaned up that space on the right-hand side so the rest of the article can have the full screen. I know this seems kind of trivial but it’s important to me because my site is going to be picture intensive and I want it to look it’s very best.
I really don’t want this to turn into a how to site, I would rather keep it as a test site so that if I have ideas about something I have a place to try them out and document them. On the other hand, I don’t want to leave you completely in the dark about some things. For example, you should already know how to add categories to your site and display them in a hierarchical form within a pulldown menu. I learned how to do this by reading the word press support pages and forms, it wasn’t difficult to figure out.
However, figuring out how to get this pulldown menu embedded into the header and populated with my categories was a little bit more difficult. There was actually a surprising amount of good documentation available in the support tool and on the forums. The only really tricky part was getting the categories to indent correctly underneath the parent categories. And even that was documented but I guess I just didn’t believe it, you really do just have to simply drag the categories over to get them aligned the way you want underneath their parents. Also keep in mind that I had to use the WP admin screen. Once there I clicked on appearances and that opened up the menu options. Play around in here and you should find everything you need.
But if you aren’t able to figure this out simply drop me a note and I’ll help you out.
The end result is absolutely fantastic! With that menu moved into the header, look at all the real estate I have available for my posts.
The Travelin' Man 