In the blogging world, there are lots of different people. Many of them—like me—are not very familiar with coding. We too, however, want to have nice, pretty, functional blogs! It can be a bit more of a challenge, though.
Starting off, bloggers generally choose between Blogger and Wordpress (free). Wordpress offers more designs, but they are not customizable in the free version. You also cannot add your own domain name for free (even if you already own it!). It’s for these reasons that I am sticking with Blogger for the foreseeable future. Self-hosted Wordpress is the ideal blogging platform, but this involves monthly hosting fees and I am not at a point in my life where that is a feasible option for me. So, what can I (affordably) do to make my blog lovely?
There are many things you can do (and I will talk about these in future posts), like getting a premade template, swapping to a more functional commenting service like intensedebate, using eye-catching images... and adding a custom menu.
(Again, I must state that I am not a coding expert in the least. I am a newbie of the first order and I want to make that clear!)
I decided a while ago that I wanted a drop down menu on my blog. I enjoy the look and functionality of them. So, I went about trying to figure out how to get one on here. This was not as easy as it sounds. Eventually I landed on dropdownmenugenerator.com. This is an online service with a small yearly fee that allows you to easily construct and install a drop down menu. For a while I was satisfied. However, after I switched to the intensedebate comment platform, this menu was no longer working for me. Why, you ask? Because intensedebate does not play well with the Mobile Blogger Template. Essentially, it just does not show up. The template reverts to the Blogger comments, and that’s kind of an issue. I was okay with the menu not showing up in the mobile template (it reverts to the Blogger page list), but having my comments available is a must!
This wasn’t altogether horrible because I happen to have already purchased a premade template that is responsive—i.e. it changes to suit the screen size. So, I just turned off the Blogger Mobile Template, allowing the template to change size on its own as needed. However, as it turned out, my menu wasn’t responsive! I emailed the lovely people at dropdownmenugenerator.com to inquire, but they don’t currently offer responsive menus. I was out of luck.**
I puttered around the internet again (for a while) and came across CSS Menu Maker. Again for a small yearly fee ($14 USD) you can construct and install a drop down menu. And this site offers responsive menus! And they are prettier than Drop Down Menu Generator! Yay! So, I signed up, created my menu, and went to install it. I followed the instructions that I found on the site (which were super hard to find and not very helpful) and installed the menu. It looked great on a desktop screen, but was not responsive on mobile. Great. I contacted the support team, and they were not able to help me either! I was directed to a third party tutorial that didn’t even address my issue: JQuery. Overall, I found the usability of the website seriously lacking. However, the customer service people were quite friendly. So there's that.
I didn't know what to do at this point. I looked into getting someone to design a custom menu for me. Some designers only worked with Wordpress, so they were out. Many of the Etsy shops that offer design services would only design a menu if I also purchased one of their templates. Well, I already had a template. So, they were out. I looked at the shop where I purchased my template. I didn't see an menu options, so I just send a message to the owner.
While waiting for a response, I took to the internet again. After piecing together bits and pieces from several different tutorials, I eventually got the menu to work! Hurrah! (Seriously though, all toll this process took over a month). I was miffed that there was not even one tutorial that addressed my issues and explained what to do! So, I thought I would make one. Hey peeps at CSS Menu Maker, you definitely should have one. Just saying. Especially if you charge.
This was a time consuming and frustrating process. It's really important to have an appealing and functional menu, so I wasn't going to give up. Since I did eventually succeed, I decided to be the person to write the tutorial that actually tells you how to do all this junk.
**Update: A week after I wrote this, Drop Down Menu Generator enabled responsive menus... #THESTRUGGLEISREAL
I've posted this in two parts because the actual tutorial bit is rather long and full of images. Here it is!
Labels: Blogging, Book Blogging Newbie, Discussion, Menu
