Pro Blog Design

One of the most important elements of your blog, is the content that you painstakingly put together to gain readers and keep the online masses surfing your waves. So why do so many bloggers not take the extra time and give more attention to their archives?

Afterall, without an easy to navigate archive section, then all of that great content that you crafted will become lost in the backpages of your post progression as you continue to crank out the content. It seems that once a post has served its initial use for us, that we carelessly discard it to the forgotten areas for the post to die, rather than institute an accessible archive that will allow those past posts to continue to deliver the punch you packed within.

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Tags have become a very popular way to browse sites online. You pick the keyword you’re after and get a set of posts specifically related to that topic. They’re ideal for bloggers for because one post can be tagged multiple times and it’s very easy to do.

Adding a tag cloud to your sidebar or footer is simple, but that only shows off a very small number of your tags. What if we could add a small link beside the tag cloud to a page with all your tags?

It’s extremely easy to do, as you’ll see below. The end result will be just like the Tag Archive page here.

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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.

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