Happy new year. Now get your menus in order.

On 06/01/2010

I was lazy last week. Really lazy. I didn't even get around to posting "Happy New Year" to the blog or our Facebook page during Thursday night's champagne-athon (though I meant to), a terrible faux pas for which I will now most humbly apologize.

"I'm really rather quite sorry. Seriously."

To be honest, last week was a whole week of nothingness for me: I didn't make a website, I didn't post to a blog, I barely skimmed Facebook, and I spent most of the week sitting around watching my cat (she was sick).

Fortunately for you, everyone else here at doomby was actually busy doing very important things last week (unlike me), and that means a whole bunch of stuff has, or is about to, change with your favorite free website builder. Today we'll focus on one of the things they were busy working on: menus (you know, those über-important navigational aids for helping others visit your website).

We brought online a raft of changes to menu management yesterday, and the biggest change means you now have the ability to configure different menus for different zones of your website. You can have a different menu for your homepage, your general pages, blog, add-ons and your e-store (available from tomorrow) if you want to – each one of these different zones with its own personalized menu. In order to differentiate menus by zone, just activate the advanced menu management feature from your member zone (in Settings > Side menus, just in case you were wondering ...).

What's the point, I hear you ask (as, yes, I have inherited my mother's pre-emptive super-hearing). Well, the idea is to adapt your menus to your page content. So while you might want to have a tag cloud in your blog menu, you may prefer to replace that with a map or contact link for your general page menu. Personalize your pages – including their menus – to better adapt their content to what your visitors are looking for at a given moment. It makes your site that much easier to navigate, and increases the likelihood of repeat visits (and that's a good thing for any website).

There's a whole bunch of other improvements that we've made to menu management (including the personalization of the contact module and – my personal favorite - adding icons to menu elements). Check them all out to see what works best with your site design ... and just for the fun of it (after all, having fun with web design is what drives us here at doomby!).

And while you're at it, let us know what you like best about the changes (or what else you'd like to see added to menu management).