One of the biggest super powers Sidenav has, is the ability to create a very rich navigation experience for your members. Depending on how your site and courses are organized, you may be able to set the navigation up in different ways:
Support for both links on the side menu and top menu
Links to pages or categories using icons for more visual appeal
Create a two-level navigation structure to group items (ex: subcategories)
Callout "special" content types more easily to remind your members that you have "more than just courses"
Creating Sidenav Menu Page Links
You can add links to any pages that you want to highlight on the Sidenav Menu
Creating Sidenav Menu Category Links
To easily add a link for any category you may have setup inside of your Thinkific site, you can add a category link
Creating a Menu Group : Subcategories or Sub Pages
If you have a lot of categories or would like to have an easy way to view your course catalog in different ways, then you will want to create a Menu Group and then create links to be associated with the menu group. This is a multi-step process depending on how many links you want in your menu group
Your sub nav link items will not appear if your Menu Group setting in your sub nav links does not match exactly to the heading in the menu group item (top level). If you change it later on, you will need to change it for all sub items as well
Creating Top Navigation Links
The Sidenav Menu is not the only place you can have links. On the top of the page there is also a place for links in a Top Bar .
Creating Automatic Community Links
To add Thinkific communities to your Sidenav Menu, you can certainly manually add Sidenav Menu Page links and use your community link. This is the recommended way if you just have one community. But if you have multiple communities, then you may want to use the Auto Communities type setting.
Creating "Smart Links"
By default, all links for the Sidenav Menu will always. But sometimes you may want to have links show only for certain types of users. For example, maybe you have a membership site that comes with a free trial. For members you may have links to other resources or pages that you do not want your free trial users to see. Or maybe you want to show links simply based on logged in state. To create these "Smart Links", be use the When to show this setting.
