Creating Hidden or Disabled pages can add a level of clarity to your site that you might not have otherwise. It also may help to clean up an overloaded navigation menu or to distinguish between various areas of your ministry. Here are the basics that you'll need to know:

A Hidden Page is a page that is accessible to everyone but does show up in your main navigation menu. There are a few reasons that you might want to "hide" a page. For instance, let's imagine that you want to highlight 4 upcoming events by placing 4 different images on your home page and turning these images into links that will point to 4 different pages with more info about these events. By turning these 4 new pages into hidden pages. you can have them be accessible through these image links without having these show up in your navigation menu.

Here's another example: Imagine that you had a sign up form for an event and as the form was submitted, you wanted to have the user redirected to a page with some text saying, "Thanks for registering for this event. We're looking forward to seeing you there." You would, of course, want to hide this "Thank You" page so that no one could simply click on the page from your navigation menu without registering for the event.

Hiding a page is very easy. If you go into the page settings you'll see a box that says, "include in menu." This box is checked by default. If you simply uncheck it and click update, the page will then be hidden. You can access a hidden page when you are logged in as an administrator by rolling over Admin and choosing Pages.

A Disabled Page is a page that will show up in your navigation menu but will not be accessible. This might sound odd at first, but consider this situation: Imagine that you want to have a list of your programs in your navigation menu. Since you have 6 programs, you don't want to put these at the top level of the nav menu but instead you want to have then as sub pages that will show up if you rollover a tab called Programs. To do this, you'll have to create a page called Programs that will show up in your navigation menu. However you don't want someone to be able to actually click on the Programs page, you simply want it to be a portal to get to your 6 programs.

Disabling a page is fairly easy. You'll simply go into the page settings, expand the advanced settings, and check the box next to the word "Disabled." Click update and you will be all set. You can access a disabled page when you are logged in as an administrator by rolling over Admin and choosing Pages. From this menu you can either delete the page or access its setting so that you can enable it.

Click here to see the tutorials that will show you how to hide or disable pages