The Design Wizard allows you to choose if you want a template with the product navigation links in the side bar region or in the top region. If you select to use a generic template, you can choose the top navigation layout, and then select any color palette for that template. When you select a pre-designed template, there are only specific templates (templates 8-10) which are based on the top navigation template.

Below the Yahoo Gear text you can see links to the top-level categories for this store. Products or categories (sections) added to the home page will appear in the product navigation links.

Top navigation layout is typically best for stores with fewer than five top level categories or products. In the image above, you can see the product navigation links (Travel Best Deals Anywhere, Techie, Outdoor, Kids, Winter Blowout Sale, view cart). If your links are short in length, you may be able to fit seven or eight links in addition to the view cart link which is added automatically to the navigation bar.

If your links are long, or you add too many categories or products to the home page, your navigation links will start to wrap to two or more lines. This condition can look bad on generic templates and can look even worse with pre-designed templates that use background images for the navigation bar.

Generic template showing links that will cause navigation to wrap to more than one line:

Pre-designed template showing links that will cause navigation to wrap to more than one line:

If your navigation wraps to too many lines you have a few options:

• Shorten the link text by shortening the category (section) or product names.
• Reduce the font size in Variables (Contents-navigation-text-link-size) for links to fit more text in one line (not recommended).
• Reduce the padding between links by modifying the CSS for links (recommended only for merchants with knowledge of CSS)
• Reorganize your categories (sections) into a smaller number of higher level sections. For example, if your site had men's shirts, men's pants, men's accessories, and the same categories for women and juniors, you may just create three higher level categories called Men's, Women's, and Junior's, and add the current categories (sections) as sub-categories to those.

See Also:

• Side navigation templates