I was looking at a blog this morning and noticed the piece I was reading was an Uncategorized post.
That mean’t that it had no index label to describe it. I suspected that all of the posts on this site were in this group. The clue was in the big list on the sidebar under related posts. In fact all of these were all unrelated articles in one big category, it was quite overwhelming.
The category system is one of those tools in WordPress that often gets overlooked; more so now that the platform is used to build websites, this is unfortunate as the feature is part of the database system used to build the software.
Having set up some sites recently using WordPress, this setup or structure can get neglected and not even mentioned in the setup documentation for the site theme.
WordPress was always a content management system before a website platform; Category labels must be defined as part of the site development and will be relevant to your content.
A blog about triathlon might have the following
Triathlon
Running
Interval Training
Swimming
Cycling
Each of these headings may have a subheading about the primary subject. For example, Running might have Interval Training
When writing, each post is assigned a category. It is this process that makes the blog accessible and searchable, and it is also a key tool for making the site relevant to the reader and a basis for good search engine optimization. (SEO)
The next stage is tags, these are effectively keywords and can be used to join categories together. With the good structure and well-placed tags, a site with a lot of posts can offer a good visitor experience. The reader can find other content of interest and move around the site with ease.
When setting up your categories think about the different subjects you will write about and how to group them. If you have been blogging for some time, it is good practice to review your categories and tags.
To see your current category structure go to posts tab on the dashboard and categories should appear, click that tab to see the structure. See the video below for a demonstration. Also for more information about categories and tags check out the article at the bottom of the post from Matt Zak.
On a personal note, a few years back the blog on this site had a messy structure until it was pointed out. Once I had set up my categories, I had a problem with Uncategorized. These were some posts that did not fit my new categories, so I changed it to “Ramblings” as these postings and were outside of my normal subject, but still valid for the blog. It is
not good practice to have a lot of these; maybe I need to revisit my structure.
The key point is we are writing for our visitors. We need to make the user experience more readable, easier to find related material that will keep them interested and sharing our content.
Matt Zak article
