How To »

The Template Tag, wp_list_pages(), displays a list of WordPress Pages as links. It is often used to customize the Sidebar or Header. So now the code of the top nav bar will look like this:

You can simply edit the header.php file and exclude any page id you want, you can also include the pages you want.

Creating Two-Tiered Conditional Navigation in WordPress »

A common navigational scheme, parent pages on top and child pages (if they exist) on bottom as seen at the top of this post.

How To »

Darren Hoyt goes through a nice solution to help us: 1) query the page, 2) determine if there are child pages, and 3) properly highlight both the .current_page_parent and .current_page_item links.

And then he show us how to use CSS to make sure the :active and :hover states display correctly whether or not subpages exist — if they do, the primary nav uses current_page_parent, if they don’t, it resorts to simply current_page_item.

Use breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are great for so many reasons: usability, SEO, etc. In terms of plugins, there are many options, my favorite is Yoast’s Breadcrumbs, because it’s easy to implement. Another breadcrumbs plugin, gives you a new template tag called breadcrumb_trail() that you can place anywhere in your theme. Once that’s done, it’ll display a hierarchical menu of where the current visitor is on your site. It’s quite useful if you have more than a few pages or posts.

Points to take care »
First problem you may run into when you make a static page your home page is that the link to that page now appears in the main site navigation. Usually the page called “Home” in the main site navigation. This tutorial shows how to remove one of those links from your site navigation so that visitors to your site are not confused by the duplicate link.
The second problem is you will see that link again in the sidebar widget, the fix is pretty simple. The WordPress Pages navigation widget now allows you to exclude any page from its links by inserting the Page IDs of pages you want to exclude into the “Exclude” box in the Pages widget.