Setting up Vend E-commerce navigation menus

Setting up navigation menus for your Vend E-commerce website can be a bit of a daunting process at first, but with a bit of practice should become a simple process very quickly!

First, you will want to make sure that all of your collections and pages that you intend to link in the navigation are fully set up. Once this is all done, we can move on to setting up the link lists themselves!

You will need to log into your Vend E-commerce admin area, and in the sidebar click on the buttons Design -> Navigation.

Click on the green Add Navigation List button. This will take you to a screen where you are prompted to enter a name and a slug for the new list. We’ll name this menu main menu as this will be the first menu that users see. Notice that as you enter the name, the slug will automatically be filled out, with any spaces converted to hyphens (-).

Next, click on the green Add a Link button, to create your first link in this link list. You will be prompted to enter a link title and choose the link type.

Link Title: The title which the link will appear with on your website.
Link Type: Can choose from a list of options:

Frontpage: creates a link to the homepage of your website
Web Address: allows you to create a link to anywhere on the web.
Collection: Allows you to easily find one of your collections from a list.
Page: Same as a collection, but for pages.
Contact Us Page: Similar to the frontpage option, this allows you to easily create a link directly to your contact us page.

One example of a main menu would be something along the lines of this:

Creating sub-menus:

Many online stores will make use of sub-menus to allow their users to browse through a wide variety of collections or pages without taking up a lot of screen space. Vend E-commerce makes setting these up a fairly straightforward process.

First, you will want to create a new link list. For this example, we’ll call it shop, as we will be linking this new list to a link in the main menu called Shop. This will make it easy to come back to later and make any changes we may need to. You will then want to create all of the links you want to appear in your sub-menu in this new link list.

Now, save this link list, and take note of its slug. Go back to the main menu link list that we created earlier and find the link that you want to use to display the sub-menu. Change its link type to Web Address and then enter the slug into the web address field.

Now, when customers mouse over the Shop link in your main menu, a sub-menu will appear with the links from the shop link-list. Some Vend themes will allow you to have ‘nested’ sub-menus, meaning that you will be can create a sub-menu that comes off of another sub-menu. To do this, repeat the process but enter the handle in the corresponding link in the sub-menu you want to be the ‘parent’.

Making your navigation menu appear on your Vend E-commerce website

In most cases, themes will come preset to use the main-menu handle as the parent menu by default, and won’t need much more configuration. However, it will still be best if you refer to the theme’s own documentation for details on how to make the menu structure you have created appear on your website.