Technical Training

Show the child links of a menu link

Why Do This?

All pages that have a link in the navigation system on the left side of the page are actually in a heirarchy or "family tree." Each major link in your site - the links that you want to show up on every page - should be placed in order of importance. If you think of your navigation as an alphanumeric outline, these links could be listed as Roman numerals:

  1. Home page
  2. Second page
  3. Third page
  4. Fourth page

Each of the links listed here are major sections to your web site. A typical feature of many web sites could be for each of these sections to have sections of their own. These sub-sections are often called "children" of the "parent" link. Using the alphanumeric outline analogy you might get this:

  1. Home page
    1. Sub-page
    2. Sub-page
  2. Second page
    1. Sub-page
      1. Detail page
      2. Detail page
    2. Sub-page
  3. Third page
    1. Sub-page
    2. Sub-page
      1. Detail page
      2. Detail page
      3. Detail page
      4. Detail page
    3. Sub-page
  4. Fourth page
    1. Sub-page
    2. Sub-page
    3. Sub-page
    4. Sub-page

You can see that the list can become very long. For the sake of readibility, you want to design your navigation system simply and efficiently. Adding too many links begins to dilute the importance of all links; especially on the home page. According to the W3C, the international group that develops web standards, too many options in a navigation list has a major drawback: it confuses your visitors who have to make choices about where to click.

Sometimes, however, you may wish to show all the "child" links of a page found in the navigation menu. This would be best reserved for navigation on sub-pages - the Uppercase Alphabet pages - in order to keep the home page as readable and efficient as possible.

STEP BY STEP PROCEDURE

  1. After logging in to your CMS account, navigate to the home page by clicking on the name of the site in the Group membership area.
    After login, the user is taken to the Group membership page
  2. In the set of editing tabs,  click on the Group tab
    Click on the group tab to access Menu editing functions
  3. Click on MENUS
    Click on the menus link to view and edit your menus
  4. Click on list links
    Click on list links to view and edit the menu structure
  5. Click on the parent page's edit link
    Clicking on edit allows you to change elements of the menu link
  6. Click on the button next to the words Show as expanded and click Save
    The Show as expanded button is uncheck by default

BONUS: after clicking on List items, you will see a table that also provides a column entitled Enabled. Unchecking the button in this column will disable a link. You may wish to do this if you wanted the page to remain published but not be present in the menu system.