In this article, I will tell you how to create menu structure through the menu administration page. You can create the structure first and fill menu with the content later.

Solution:

Choose Menu item in Site administration. Here, you can create a new menu and add menu items there. You should specify URL for every menu item.

For example, you’ve added the following menu:

My menu
-section 1 (www.my_site.com/section1)
-section 2 (www.my_site.com/section2)

Now you should enter Site administration > Blocks and output your menu in the desired place on a page.

And here we go – beginner in Drupal clicks ‘section 1’ link and see “Page not found” message. It’s not so obvious how to create this page.

It’s pretty simple – you should just choose Create a node item in site administration menu and add the required document for ‘section 1’ link. Please note that you have to assign to this node the same URL as the appropriate menu item (section 1) has. To do that, you should enable Path module from the base Drupal installation. Then you’ll find “URL settings” item on a page for  creating a new node (name of an item could differ for different Drupal installations). Enter ‘section 1’ there and save the node. Now, this node will be shown when a user clicks ‘section 1’ menu item.

This could seem like a double work, but this way you can easily create the menu structure and add content later.

Good luck!