Categories

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“Life is full of surprises and serendipity. Being open to unexpected turns in the road is an important part of success. If you try to plan every step, you may miss those wonderful twists and turns. Just find your next adventure-do it well, enjoy it-and then, not now, think about what comes next.” – Condoleeza Rice

When I first started using WordPress, I wasn’t blogging as much as just using it as a place to store a series of posts I was doing on social media as a response to the ugliness of the 2016 election cycle. I put all those posts in a category called antidotetomeanness and didn’t put any thought into categories overall.

Then when I started blogging in earnest, I still didn’t put much thought into categories and generally dumped them in a category called meditation, thinking that would cover almost any pondering on life.

Which is a little shame on me moment because I create information architectures for companies for a living – that is, I help them design the ways to store information that is structured, findable and meaningful for those who need to find it. Of course a lot of people, especially the younger generation, just use search to find things but if things are tagged appropriately we can also create effective navigation to guide people to things we think are most relevant.

But to be fair, I wasn’t sure what I was going to be writing about and wanted to be findable. Now that I have some experience under my belt, I wanted to put some thought into categories and maybe update my navigate to point to things I post about regularly – like my dad’s humor cards and the confidence series I’ve been working on.

I had a few questions:

  1. If I updated a post to change how it’s categorized would it email all my followers to notify them and create an email storm? The answer is thankfully, no.
  2. If I create a parent category like “archive” could I make a menu item for the navigation that would automatically include all the posts that I rearranged to be sub-topics?

Yes! When I created the parent topic, it had 0 posts in the top-level category but still if I navigate to the page for the category, it shows me all the posts that make up the subcategories and I can also add it to the navigation menu if I want to.

3. I wanted to create a menu header for my regularly used topics so that it provided a place for a drop-down menus of my two most common categories: humor and confidence. I ended up created a page for “topics” and then used that to anchor the sub-menu items for my categories:

Once I started to get comfortable with the answers, I had a lot of fun playing around with categories and how they can be useful. It’s opened a whole new level about how I can make things fun and findable on my home page.

Do you use categories? Do you plan them out or just add them as needed?

(featured photo from Pexels)

34 thoughts on “Categories”

  1. I currently have 17 categories and 187 tags. Occasionally I’ll rejig the categories, but I don’t add new ones very often. At one point, I had around 1000 tags, which was rather excessive. Now I try to avoid creating new tags unless there are several posts that I would use them on. I haven’t included any categories in my menu, but I have a category widget in my sidebar.

    Liked by 4 people

  2. Somewhere, sometime way back I used a few categories and various tags. Then WP began to change, I wasn’t writing as much and honestly I just decided I didn’t care. I doubt anyone is really seeking out specific posts on my blog, and I’m not about growing an audience anyway. I’ll typically just add a link if an older post seems really relevant to something new, but I’m pretty lazy about that as well! That all said, I think the use of those tools depends upon how you use your blog and your purpose for blogging overall. From another viewpoint- I can totally appreciate that satisfaction of getting things organized in a logical way!

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    1. That approach makes a lot of sense to me too. I’d imagine things like category would be more useful for your family history blogging but I bet tags would work to link that content as well.

      Liked by 1 person

    1. I’m not sure if it’s always worked like this but now when you create a category, it asks if you want to identify a parent category. I also found that if you go into your categories from your wp-admin, it lets you click on a category, deselect it as a parent category and then select another category as a parent. Then you can put parent or sub-categories on your menu.

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  4. What a wonderful notion. Unfortunately, my eyes glaze over at the very thought of trying to set something up for myself. You would understand completely if you saw the condition of my computer files. Oy. 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

  5. I’ve debated this myself, especially for farm specific tips that I plan on writing about. I think categories is a good idea but I also think that less is more. I don’t like busy blogs

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  6. Since I write only when I have something I’d like to say that might add substance to my long list of posts, I make virtually no effort to promote what I write. The flood of information I’d like to consume competes with the shadow of time. Thus, I am doubtless a poor example of how to increase the chance other bloggers will find and pay attention to me. My ambition has largely fled with age, except for doing a little more good in the world and being kind without becoming a doormat.

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  7. It’s funny, this question has been on my mind. We do use categories, and sub-categories, not tags. And they do need a serious revision: when we started to blog, pre-pandemic, it was mostly going to be about our journey into what-does-one-do-on-the-Endless-Weekend, and our very elaborate plan included travel for the first year+. And then came Covid. And so we shifted. And re-shifted as our thoughts shifted. And the categories are strewn in all those eras. We definitely are in need of a reorging. Now we need to motivate ourselves to do that…

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    1. Wow – that’s an interesting perspective on the many ways Covid has shifted life. Oh, this has been an interesting ride, hasn’t it? Well, I think categories will be there whenever (or if) you ever feel like it. But also maybe things will shift back?

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  8. Thanks for this, Wynne. Having just started trying to promote my blog, I have been reading a lot about tags and categories and the advice is confusing. Your advice makes sense and I probably need to look at this and become more efficient in organising my blog structure.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I can relate so much to your comment. I think it’s hard to know how to categorize when we are just starting but it seems worth thinking about. Good luck with that!

      Liked by 1 person

  10. That’s very cool that you work with companies on IAs. What great work. I did some web stuff in my former role. By no means an expert but it was fun work.

    That’s great that you are reorganizing your content. You have such great content on your blog and it’s a fun activity to see just how much content you’ve created and gives you inspiration to blog ahead too.

    Enjoy!

    Liked by 2 people

    1. What a wonderful perspective you add about being able to see the product of our work. I hadn’t thought of it but I totally agree that it’s a nice benefit! Have a great weekend!

      Liked by 1 person

  11. Thanks Wynne for all this helpful information! I have done similar categories as you did with meditation except I threw 500+ blogs into the category recovery because it was all fitting. I have been thinking about reorganizing it except only recategorizing the most popular blogs or the ones that are most helpful! Great project I might play with as me and my family recovering from Covid. Thanks 🙏 one question is are you able to re categorize on your phone or only on laptop 💻?

    Liked by 1 person

    1. So sorry that you all (except your son, thankfully) are recovering from Covid. I don’t know about recategorizing from your phone. I think you can update the posts including the categories from a mobile device but I haven’t tried it myself. Wishing you a speedy recovery!

      Liked by 1 person

  13. Isn’t it fun to be organized? When I started my blog, the idea was to have a humorous parenting book, divided into chapters. Those chapters became the categories. Didn’t publish that book, but it still gave birth to the blog. I don’t use those except when I want to find a post to link back to.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I love this idea – both how you came up with them in the first place and that it became the blog. You’re right, it is so fun to be organized, even as the plan changes!

      Liked by 1 person

  14. This post spoke to me. I had such a difficult time with categories and tags when I first started blog. I eventually figured out that for the sake of my sanity I needed to have some very specific general categories, so I have 9. As for tags I have a list of the ones I use most often, but I’m never above making up a very special tag for a particular post. Don’t know if that’s how one is supposed to blog, but that’s what I do.

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