Genesis is the most powerful framework to create beautiful, powerful, and clean themes for your website. It’s one of the few HTML5 frameworks to build your own theme. However, it’s not easy for people who never used HTML to create a sticky menu in their blogs like many others. Today, I’ll show you a simple Plugin to create a free WordPress sticky menu for your Genesis theme.
Before starting, let’s answer why a sticky menu is important, and when you should use it on your website.
If you have a blog with lots of information and you’re not making your menu appearing at the top of every page, then, you’re losing some of your page views and revenue in the end, you might ask why?
The main reason is that people and, especially, those who visit your blog for the first time won’t be interested in other content after reading an article. They come from search engines or any other source of traffic, and when they find an answer or a solution for their problem, they simply leave your site and maybe forever.
The secret here is to attract their intention with that fixed menu at the top of every page, when they scroll down, your menu still fixed and plays the role of advertisement for your content.
Another good reason for using a sticky menu is that you show your most important links to people. Not all people will see your menu twice, when they scroll down, they still there until finishing the article. Your menu will invite them to a full category of articles, that might interest them.
Generally, they will spend more time on your blog or website, and this is a very important goal to achieve.
Now, let’s install the sticky menu plugin for Genesis, it’s called “Genesis Sticky Menu” and you can download it for free directly from the WordPress plugin directory. After installing and activating it, you will find the menu settings under the Genesis link:
You can select the background color, hover, and the text, just make your menu color look good.
After done with the settings, you need to create links in your menu. Just click on ”Appearance”, then ”Menu” and check the box “Genesis Sticky Menu”.
Please remember that this plugin works only for genesis themes from StudioPress. All other themes are not supported. Also, if your theme includes bugs or not updated, you will see some issues like not exact position and things similar.
If you don’t have a Genesis theme, you won’t find any other plugin to make a sticky menu, but you can contact your theme creator for help, browse their tutorials and you will get help.
The main issue why not creating a plugin for all themes is that it needs more work than a special one. Themes are changed and updated every week and it will be really hard to update all that at once. If you are a developer and you want to create that plugin, find other developers, and work together. Thus, you will help others to get their fixed menu, without the risk to lose their themes and settings.
