Drop(down) the Monthly Archives.
Arguably, the most important feature in your blog's design is its usability. Can the reader get what they want? A large part of that is giving them the space to manoeuvre unhindered by clutter and superfluous gadgets.
In order to keep your blog clutter-free, you must be ruthless with your sidebar content. There are thousands of Wordpress plugins available, and it is very tempting to install them all. The wise blogger knows to add only the options which will be beneficial to the user, which begs the question;
How are the monthly archive links useful?
In most cases, they aren't. The monthly archives are a remnant from when blogs were literally online diaries. When the posts are a biography of someone's life, then it can indeed be very interesting to look back to what they were like in the past. The monthly archives were also a lot less hassle than properly categorising posts.
However, blogs are much more than that nowadays. The information is no longer just personal, it is extremely useful! How could a reader find your best posts by picking a meaningless month name? They couldn't, and that is why a monthly archives list is usually just an unnecessary source of clutter in your sidebar.
To delete the archives from your sidebar, open sidebar.php, and delete the following line: (NB - There may also be text between the brackets.)
<?php wp_get_archives(); ?>
How To Show The Monthly Archives in a Drop Down in Wordpress
The biggest problem with monthly archives is that the size of the list grows every single month, taking up more and more room. There is however, a way of getting around this; use a drop-down list. The drop-down takes up very little space until clicked on, and is a suitable method of browsing through the months because they are all in order, making a particular date easy to find.
The code to add this drop-down has actually been put into the Wordpress Codex already, but I'll paste it below anyway.
<select name="archive-dropdown" onChange='document.location.href=this.options[this.selectedIndex].value;'>
<option value=""><?php echo attribute_escape(__('Select Month')); ?></option>
<?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly&format=option&show_post_count=1'); ?> </select>
And there you have it, a much more compact method of showing the archives. You can see this method being used well on Mike Goad's Exit 78, where Mike has actually used the same technique on his long category list as well.
If you're currently showing a long list of months on your blog, then the best advice is to either drop, or drop down that list. You'll notice the different immediately.
Enjoy this post? Get future updates sent to you for free! Join by email or RSS.
About the Author - Michael Martin is the founder of Pro Blog Design. He works as a freelance web designer, loves WordPress, and has an unhealthy addiction to smilies. Written on 11th August 2007.
Other posts tagged with Archives, Clutter, Dropdowns, Sidebar, WordPress.
12th August, 1:38 am GMT
Good points here. It drives me crazy when I go to a blog that is cluttered with useless crap and riddled with ads.
12th August, 5:24 pm GMT
Thanks for the tips. I really like your blog design btw. Good job.
12th August, 8:31 pm GMT
Matthew - Couldn't agree more.
Michael - Back at ya!
13th August, 2:01 am GMT
Nice tips. I have erase archives in my sidebar and make it into my page file using smart archives plugin. Stuffing sidebar will many things tend to pull reader's attention out of the original content and some will not read it thoroughly!
13th August, 6:55 am GMT
Thanks for bringing this up. I never thought about it before and now that I am thinking about it, what you said makes sense. I might very well implement your ideas.
13th August, 11:44 am GMT
Ken Xu - I see what you've done there, and I like it a lot! You have the same advantages of showing things chronologically (Including showing how long your blog has been around for), but because the article names are also shown, it's actually useful. Great implementation!
pablopabla - It would be worth experimenting with probably. If you miss the archives after a week, then you can always put them back in.
(If you like the archives because it shows that you've been blogging for months now, I can understand that. But your blog already shows that it is active by listing the comment counts next to the category names, and the most recent comments.)
14th August, 9:32 am GMT
Thanks for the tips. I used a similar hack for Blogger, when i was on it. Now, I have archives, but going by the looks of it, I'll probably take it off completely!
14th August, 12:08 pm GMT
I do think it would be worthwhile. For one thing, with the space you're freeing up, you could add in a different widget if you liked?
Perhaps a blogroll? Latest comments? Posts?
There are quite a few things that your readers might find more useful.
18th August, 6:40 pm GMT
Great article. Thanks for the information. I already moved my archives further down the page and added a Favorite Post list near the top to direct people to the most read articles.
18th August, 7:26 pm GMT
Good idea Patricia. A Favorite Post list is an extremely useful addition to your blog; especially for first time visitors, because they can get straight to your best articles.
20th August, 3:14 pm GMT
I'll go do that now!
20th August, 6:41 pm GMT
Hi Mommy Zabs. I can see you've done it on your blog now. Glad this tip was of some use to you.
Your sidebar looks neater than what I imagine it was before hand (Your blog has been online for quite a while. Congrats!
). I think it also draws more attention to your category list above, because people aren't distracted by the months. 
27th August, 7:22 am GMT
Just what I've been looking for and was getting resigned to not being able to find a solution so easy to implement. With a blog that's been going since 2004 the list of archives was a real pain. I've dropped them completely from the sidebar and have the dropdown in the footer. Now about to tackle the categories (which are much too numerous but culling them is a job for another day). Many thanks.
27th August, 12:10 pm GMT
Hi Des Walsh,
The dropdown looks good in your footer. It seems to fit in very neatly. Good idea.
As for the categories, this post involves a different drop-down technique that might help you with them. Perhaps that would work?
5th January, 10:11 am GMT
Thanks, I was looking for something just like this ;D
12th January, 12:22 pm GMT
Welcome.
19th March, 10:46 pm GMT
Thanks for the tip Michael. But I have a problem, the menu I want to place the dropdown archive in is of a shorter width than what's being displayed. I think two things need to be adjusted in the code for it to fit and I was wondering if you know what the correct code bits are and where to put them in the code you show above?
1. The maximum width size for the dropdown menu can only be 100 pixels.
2. The font size should probably be half of what it is on standard, so the month names won't stretch the dropdown menu.
It's either one or the other, or both, any help you can give would be much appreciated!
19th March, 11:39 pm GMT
Supa,
Do you know CSS? You can use that to style how the drop-down looks.
e.g. Change the "
<select name="archive-dropdown"part to:
<select style="width:100px;font-size:11px;" name="archive-dropdown"6th April, 3:59 am GMT
Thanks for the codes. It works fine on my site.
7th April, 1:36 pm GMT
Hi Michael, thanks so much for that, it worked perfectly! Although I didn't have to add it to the style.css but instead I could add it to the .php page with the dropdown archive code you provided. Thanks again!
12th May, 7:03 pm GMT
is there a way to show both months and years (depending on the year) in the drop down?
say i wanna only show months for 2008 and just year links for years 2007/2006...
is that possible?
thanks!
2nd August, 3:38 pm GMT
I have a question ...
How do I make the archive dropdown list to work without Javascript?
15th August, 2:26 am GMT
How can this be made to work with pages?
i'm trying to play with the WP function -> wp_dropdown_pages
I can get it to show up in the theme but when a page is clicked on the page doesn't load
15th August, 10:13 pm GMT
I love to have the dropdown over all the list of archives, I'm just wondering if there's a way to get it to validate. When I check my site with this code, I get:
Line 272, Column 41: there is no attribute "onChange" .
…ect name="archive-dropdown" onChange='document.location.href=this.options[thi
Can you tell me how I could change that?
Please and thank you
24th February, 5:43 pm GMT
same question how to make this passed the validation? thanks:)
24th February, 5:56 pm GMT
in addition make the capital letter "C" on the "onChange=" to small "c" to make it XHTML validated;)
15th September, 5:00 am GMT
thanks for this share... i'd been looking for archives with listbox...
12th December, 3:53 pm GMT
Thanks! I just collapsed about 3 inches of sidebar clutter (5 years back archives) to one line. Sweeeet!
12th December, 8:00 pm GMT
Alan,
Wow, that's quite a change! Definitely sounds like it was worth doing on your site!
5th January, 4:35 pm GMT
Thanks for the code. thank you very much
2nd February, 9:55 pm GMT
Found this link along with the link to the wordpress codex at the same time, I knew there was a way to do it but couldn't remember how! (of course after i put the code in my sidebar I realized I widgetized my theme so I could have done it all along from within the admin panel)...oh well at least now I know what to do and where to do it at in the future!
24th February, 4:02 pm GMT
nice!!! straight to the point tutorial, got the drop down less than a minute;)
28th March, 3:31 am GMT
this tag thas I've been seaching. really helpful, and thanks a lot
11th April, 7:52 pm GMT
Thanks a million! This is exactly what I was looking for
20th May, 11:22 pm GMT
Thanks very much! You are made of awesome.
28th May, 4:00 am GMT
I had been looking for a plugin to do this for me, and here it is in easy to use cut and paste code! Awesome! Thanks. Implemented within about two seconds on both of my blogs.
Nick - Freelance Graphic and Web Designer’s Latest Post: The Hahn Super Dry Ringtone
8th June, 4:09 am GMT
Dude... Worked great on a friend's blog.... cut and paste done.
Many thanks.
Tank’s Latest Post: 1 year Popular Science and PM for 5 bucks (think Father's Day)