Pro Blog Design

It can be very tedious to navigate through a category on a WordPress blog. Your navigation options tend to be limited to “Next Page”/”Previous Page".

Not the most efficient method in the world…

When you do a search on Google, you can skip to page 3, 4, 5 or anything else. And once you do, you can always click back to page 1. It makes flicking through a large number of results much, much easier.

So, why don’t we recreate that in WordPress? Milo is going to show us how.

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Most blogs put their posts into various categories, and then list the categories in the sidebar. It’s the done thing.

But how useful are categories really? Would tags be more helpful for your readers?

Few Categories vs. Many Tags

Categories are most effective when there’s a small number of them. The small list is easily digestible by a reader and organizes your blog into its major sections.

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Photo by *Micky* Categories are very easy to set up in a blog. So easy in fact, that we can often get carried away and end up with dozens of categories, all clogging up space in our sidebars. Rather than deleting these categories, we can remove the clutter by linking the categories into groups.

We then show only the group titles in the sidebar, and when a group title is clicked, the list of categories in that group expands beneath it. You can see a demo here.

This solution is very easy to implement, will remove the clutter for the vast majority of your users. For your users, and search engines, who have disabled Javascript, the complete list of categories will be shown as normal (And for the code junkies, it’s also XHTML valid!)

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The purpose of categorising posts is to organise your content. You group similar posts into sections, allowing readers to easily find all the posts on a certain topic. However, categories are more than just a list in the sidebar.

How Are Categories Ordered in a New Blog?

When a blog is new, naturally it will have fewer posts. Therefore, posts are grouped into rather broad categories. For instance; this post is currently categorised into the “Blog Usability,” category. Usability in itself is a huge topic, encompassing many sub-sections. As the blog is still new though, there is no need to break into these sub-sections.

Small blogs have a small number of categories.

As Your Blog Grows, Your Categories Grow

Over time, you post more and more, and the blog becomes larger and larger. However, because your blog is virtual, viewable only on a screen, you don’t see that.

Forget about the computer, and think about each post as a written document, and your blog as a filing cabinet. In the beginning, it may be suitable for you to use a separate drawer for each category, however, each page you add is filling up the cabinet. What do you do when there are so many pages that finding a certain one takes forever? You divide up the drawer. You take all of the pages in that drawer, and categories those, e.g. by name, by date or by topic.

Why should blogs be any different?

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