Organizing Your Blog
It is important to get your navigation organized, and in blogging, the following can be used to do this:
1. Categories
2. Pages
3. Tags
For the many who jumped into the blogging bandwagon a few years back pages, categories and tags were created as the topics came to mind. After all, the majority of blogs on the web are still personal, whether hosted for free, or paid.
For those who find a myriad of categories. sometimes redundant, this is a good time to do some Blog Housekeeping.
Organizing your Categories
There are two ways to do this:
A. By Category
1. Determine which categories are important.
Like in a static website, your navigation should ideally contain only about eight (8) main topics. So you can write down your 8 main categories.
2. Add sub-categories.
You can do this by creating a category and assigning a Parent Category (easily done in WordPress blogs via Dashboard > Manage > Categories and you will find a bar near the bottom of the page that gives you this option)
3. Reassign Posts. Review your blog posts and start assigning one post to one category or subcategory only. Why so? Because when you decide to use a news, magazine or other premium template (a lot of good ones are available for fee) there are options to feature your latest post based on category. If you assign one post to more than one catgory, then the post might come out twice, which will not be good for your home page.
B. By Post
1. Delete all categories in your Dashboard > Manage > Categories section. This will set your all your posts to the default category (that you already selected when you set up your blog).
2. Review your postsand assign a category for each one.
The Benefits of Organizing Your Blog Now:
1, It will be easier to do this before your entries become too many to be manageable.
2. It will give your site a professional look.
3. It will make it easier for your visitors to navigate your site.
4. It will make using a premium template easier, so all you will need then is to assign the categories to show your posts.
Organizing Your Pages.
Your pages usually are contained in the navigation bar of your header, which is a limited space because it is horizontal while your categories are usually found on the sidebar, which is vertical. And in a lot of themes, the search bar or rss button take up the right side of your horizontal nav bar.
The good news is that there are many themes now that come with a drop-down navigation like you see here. So if you organize your pages, and assign sub-pages to parent pages (Dashboard > Manage > Pages) the same way you would categories, then the sub-pages will also be accessible should your blog use a theme with a dropdown menu.
What to Do with Tags?
Tags are the keywords that best describe your post. You can assign more than one tag per article. These are great for Search Engine Optimization so, for example, this particular post can have the following tags: blogging, wordpress, search engine optimization.
In assigning tags, look at what you wrote and see which keywords you used more often and assign tags.
In blogs, you can have a Tag Cloud on your sidebar, which also behaves as a secondary natvigation tool. Tag clouds are called such, because they appear, not as a list, but as a group of words — some heavy, some light, some bolder than others — indicating which keywords you use more often than the others.
In organizing your blog, or rather, in re-organizing your blog, you can first leave the tags you have already assigned be, then review each post and add tags where you should or remove tags which you feel are redundant. For example, you might have tagged one post with “ask.com,” and then another with “ask” so it will be best if you chose only one of those tags and modify the one post to have the same tag as the other.
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2 Responses to “Organizing Your Blog”
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Great post on cleaning house on your categories within a Wordpress blog. I am definitely going to do this to the blog on one of my law related websites.
The previous owner of my site went crazy with the categories and pretty much assigned a separate category for each post even though a lot of the post could have been organized into a few categories.
Thanks for the insight:-)
Hi Scott,
Yup, we tend to go crazy with categories. Actually the best blogs are not “intuitive” ones. When one starts a site, the first thing would be to concentrate of navigation structure.
I tell my “students” to determine and organize their topics first before firing away. This post is for those of us who jumped right into blogging without realizing, like a regular static website, that we should plan before posting.