How to? topnav horizontal, subnav in sidebar left

Hi all,

I use WP as a cms mainly and am creating my first theme. Very little PHP knowledge..

I want to use two horizontal nav bars, one in the upper part of the header, one between header and main, the latter providing only three main topics.
I’d like to display the subnav for these three topics in a sidebar on the left.

I figured out how to separate the menu items using the wp_list_pagesattributes include/exclude, and both horizontal bars display nicely as expected.

I’m having trouble however setting up and displaying the sidebar with the submenu items. For a start, I tried to call the sub items manually using <php? wp_list_pages('title_li=<h2>Pages</h2>&child_of=173,176,178').
(Unsure whether title_li is used the right way, anyway there’s no change without it.)

So,

• am I using child_of the right way?
• How do I make this dynamic, so it calls only the sub items of the topic I’ve clicked on?

Help is greatly appreciated.

Cheers –