Demosphere Tip of the Week: Navigation Tips to Improve Your Website

Demosphere Navigation Module

Help your members navigate your website with ease by using Demosphere’s content navigation module. This tool is designed to enhance your website visitor’s overall experience. Visitors browse the website using the tabs and dropdown menu items found within your site. 

Website admins can add menus to any container within the site. The Demosphere graphics team will typically setup the initial top level menus during the design process.

To edit the main navigation content from your homepage,  hover over the right side of the module and the edit tools will appear:

A new window will open titled Edit Menu. The default tab, manage navigation links & menus, is where you will work to add the departments that may have been previously built within the site map. Click on the green add item button located below the menu display preview, within the menu builder container.

 

Menu Options:

A new window opens titled add new menu item. There are three item type choices to choose from:

• The Link option is best used when adding menu items that you want to be clickable and redirect to a page outside of your website
• The SubMenu option is best used when adding menu items that you do not necessarily want to be clickable, but have dropdown menus below
• The Copy from Site Map option allows you to choose from any of the departments available within your sitemap. Keep in mind, if your Site Map changes, you will also need to update your navigation menu items

 

When adding menu items from your site map, select the department to build your menu, and then click the green + button to the left of the department or sub-department that you want to add to the navigation module. Save your changes and proceed with adding the next menu items:

 

 

Cloning Menus:

The cloned instances tab is where you can easily clone the navigation module to additional locations on your website. I recommend cloning the navigation module to all design template locations. Click on the green clone to additional location button

 

Scroll down until you see design templates, and click on the templates that have a green + next to it. If there is not a green + next to the design template then that means the navigation module item has already been cloned to that design template. Save the additional location.

Finally, you will be redirected to the new location to place the menu on the page. An orange ‘orphaned content’ box appears at the bottom of the screen, hover over the item and use the yellow drag icon to drag the module item to it’s new location. All departments that use the design template will be updated.

Furthermore, your website can have unlimited navigation modules. Feel free to play around with adding vertical navigation menus to the side containers of your interior pages! Remember, you can always set the publishing options to “pending” to see how things will look before they’re live!

Lastly, navigation modules are full responsive, so they’ll look great on any device!

Happy navigating!