Moving Pages - about Page Rankings
You can control where a page will sit in your website's menu using Page Ranking's. By menu we mean the way people navigate or move around your website.
Page Ranking sets where a page will appear in your menu. Each page on your website has a Page Ranking. When you first add a page you are asked to enter a Page Ranking at the bottom of the Add/Edit A Page facility.
You can set your page rankings to any value from 1000 to 0. Pages with a higher ranking will appear before pages with lower ranking in your website's menu.
Example:A site has the following pages: Home, About Us, Our Services, and Contact Us. To make them appear in this order, Home would need to have a higher Page Ranking than About Us, About Us would need to have a higher page ranking than Our Services, and Our Services would need to be higher than Contact Us.
- Home: Page Ranking = 900
- About Us: Page Ranking = 800
- Our Services: Page Ranking = 700
- Contact Us: Page Ranking = 600
Notice we have left room to add further pages in the future between these menu items. By doing so makes the job of added extra pages in the future easier.
Getting Started
To view the page rankings for each page on your website, go to Site Management > Manage Your Pages. Page Rankings for each page are displayed in the Ranking column.
To change a web page's ranking, you need to edit that page and change value of the Page Ranking field (located at the bottom of the Edit a Page Facility).
Example:The screen shot below shows the Manage Your Pages module for a website that has 7 pages. If you look at the Rankings column, you will see that the pages are displayed on the screen in reverse numerical order.
The below screen shot shows how the menu would appear for this website. The pages also appear on the website in reverse numerical order based on their page ranking. That is, Home (950) appears before About Us (900), About Us (900) appears before Services (850).
Page Ranking FAQs
What value can a page ranking be?
Rankings can be any whole value between 1000 and 0. So a page ranking can be 1, 200 or 976 but it can't be 21.75 or 1/2. It has to be a whole number
What Page Ranking values should I choose for each of my pages?
The first thing you need to do is work out what pages you web site has and what order you want them to appear in your menu. Drawing up a site map is really useful for this.
Once you have done this, start by setting the page values for the page that you want to appear first in your menu and the page that you want to appear last. Usually you want your Home page to be first so give it a really high number like 950. Most sites have their Contact Us page appearing as the last page in their menu, so set it to a really low number like 50.
It is a good idea to leave some space between numbers in case you want to change the order of pages at a later date or add additional pages. Leaving an interval of 50 between each page is a good idea. If you number your pages 50, 49, 48 and 47 and then want to add a new page between 49 and 48, you have to go page 47 and change its ranking to 46, then change page 48 to ranking 47 to make a gap for the new page. If you set your page rankings to 500, 450, 400 and 350 and then want to add a page between 450 and 400, you can just create a new page with Ranking 430.
Do Page Rankings need to be Unique?
The short answer is yes.
Technically you can give a page the same ranking as another page but it will either result in one of the pages not showing up on the site at all or the two pages will appear in the menu based on the alphabetical order of the Page Title. Its better to use unique values.
Help, I've accidentally given a page the same ranking as another page
Don't worry if you accidentally give a page the same ranking as another page on your site. Just go back into edit that page and change the ranking to a new number. Save your changes and the problem is fixed. You won't have cause any permanent damage to your site.
Moving pages in your menu
To change where your pages appear in your menu, you simply need to change the Ranking for that page.
To change a pages ranking, click on page title of the page that’s ranking needs to be changed, scroll down to the bottom of the Edit Page screen until you locate the Ranking field and change the ranking. Click Save & Preview or Save & Publish to save your changes. When you go back to the Manage Your Pages view, you should see the page has a different ranking and has moved in the list of pages on your site. If you refresh your website you should see that this page has moved on your website.
ExampleUsing the below example, I have decided that Facilities should appear before About Us in the menu, straight after the Home page. To do this I need to change the ranking of Facilities to a number that is lower Home and higher than About Us. That is a value between 950 and 900.
Open the Facilities page in Edit mode and change the Ranking to any number between 950 and 900. In this example I have chosen 925. Click the submit button. This will save the changes and return you to the Manage Your Webpages screen.
Facilities now appears between Home and About Us.
If we were to look at the website we could also see that the menu has changed.
If Home had of had a page ranking of 950 and About us a page ranking of 949, I couldn’t have just changed the ranking for Facilities as there isn’t a whole number between 949 and 950 to choose from. If this had of been the case I would have had to edit the ranking of About Us or Home first.
Sub Menus
What is a sub menu?
Have you ever been on a website that has a drop down menu that appears as you roll over the menu? Or when you click on a menu item another menu appears? This is called a sub menu. The main menu items (the ones that are always displayed in the main navigation) are called Top Level pages.
The screen shot below shows an example website that has 8 pages. 2 of these pages, Location and History, are sub pages. That is they appear under About Us (the top level page) in the menu. Similarly Spring 2006 Foals is a sub page under Breeding Practice.
This is how it would appear on a website. As you can see Location and History are in a drop down list under the top level page, About Us.
Rankings for Subpages
If you look at the Rankings for the two pages under About Us you will notice that the ranking for Location is actually greater than the ranking for About Us and the ranking of History is the same as the ranking for About Us. This is because rankings start all over again within the sub page level.
It doesn’t matter what the ranking of the top level page is because the rankings for sub pages are independent of the top level page. Again they can be anywhere from 1000 to 0. Think of it as a separate menu within the main menu. The same rules apply for sub pages as top level pages – pages appear in reverse numerical order based on their rankings. If you want to change where a sub page appears on your website within that list of sub pages, simply change the rankings as you would any other page.
Creating a Sub-Page
To create a new sub page, select Site Management > Manage Your Pages and click on the Add a Page button. Choose the template for that page by clicking on the appropriate template. The Edit Page facility now appears.
If you want to change an existing page into a subpage go into Site Management > Manage Your Pages and select the page you want to edit by clicking on it.
One of the very first options you will see on this page is “Where should this page live?”. Click on the Page Hierarchy (Menu) drop down list. To create a sub page, you need to change Page Hierarchy from Top Level and select the page you want this page to sit under.
Example:Adding a New Subpage. I want to add a sub page to the About Us page. Set Page Hierarchy (Menu) to About Us from the drop down list and continue creating the page as you would any other page. I want this page to appear after History in the drop down sub menu of my site so I set the page Ranking to be 850.
Once all the details for your page have been completed, I click Save & Publish. You should now see a third page under About Us.
Example:Changing a Top Level Page a Subpage. In this example I would like Facilities to appear under the About Us page, between Location and History.
Go to Site Management > Manage Your Pages and click on the Edit Icon for Facilities. Under “Where should this page live?” click on the Page Heirarchy (Menu) drop down list. Choose About Us form the drop down list.
At the bottom of the edit screen change the page ranking as well. I want this page to appear between Location and History. If we look at the screen shot of the Page Rankings, you can see that Location has a ranking of 950 and History a ranking of 900. I am going to choose a Page Ranking between this to make Facilities appear between the two. I've choses a Page Ranking of 925.
Click Save. The page should now be nested under About Us. It will no longer appear at the top level of the menu on my website.
Example:Changing a Subpage to be a Top Level Page. A sub page can be changed to be a top level page by changing the Page Heirarchy (Menu) setting to be Top Level.
Using the same example we have been working with, I have decided that I want Location to be a top level page that will appear in my main menu.
Go to Site Management > Manage Your Pages and click on the Edit Icon for Location. Under “Where should this page live?” click on the Page Heirarchy (Menu) drop down list. Choose Top Level from the drop down list.
You need to remember to change the page ranking as well. As a nested page Location had a page ranking of 950. If you don’t change the page ranking field it will keep the same ranking which may not be where you want it to appear in your menu. In this case I want Location to appear after About Us but before Breeding Practice. So I need to change the page ranking to 870 (or any other number between 900 and 850).
Click Save. Location will now appear in the Manage Your Pages view in bold text to denote it is a top level page.