Build A Blog

Categories, Pages and Links – Are you using them properly?

Written by Mandy

If you’ve been following my series on Wordpress.com then you’ll know that we’ve looked at how to start a blog with Wordpress.com. And learned how to customise it by changing to your chosen theme, we’ve also looked at what a widget is and how to add them to your blog to add functionality. Now it’s time to look at the navigation for your blog, you want your readers to be able to move around your blog easily because of it’s simple and useful navigation. You want your readers to stay on your blog and come back regularly because it’s easy to use and gives them value.

Categories, Pages and Links…

These are the basis to your blogs navigation, and if used properly they will enhance your blog and make it an easy place to navigate. If you take a look at the top of this blog you’ll see them in action, above the name of the blog you’ll see my pages and underneath the blog name or header you’ll see my categories. Lets look at them more closely:

Categories

Obviously a blog is like an online diary and you can scroll down the page, to read previous entries, but it can only show so many posts on that one page. Once they move off the front page they will fall into the blogs archives, and archives are not the easiest or nicest place to search through. But if you use categories well on your blog then your readers have a very easy time finding the information that they are looking for. Take this blog for instance, maybe a reader doesn’t want to know about Wordpress.com which I have been talking about a lot recently, but they may want to learn about my case study blog or about marketing for blogs. It’s easy for them to find that information because all they have to do is click on the relevant link in my navigation bar, and it will take them to all the articles that have been assigned that category.

It’s very easy to assign or create categories. Just select or create a category when writing your blog post using the category tab on the right side of the text box where you write your post.

Beware though when writing articles make sure you assign a category in the first place and then make sure it’s relevant, there’s no point in having a messy category system. Of course some articles will overlap and need to be in 2 or more categories but just make these decisions carefully. Try and think like a reader would visiting your blog, put yourself in their shoes.

Pages

This is where I think Wordpress stands apart from other blogging platform providers like Blogger. Pages was also the reason I moved my blog to Wordpress in the first place. Wordpress gives you the ability to create pages for your blog, you can see them in action in my navigation bar at the very top of this blog. At the moment I have an about, archives and an articles page for popular articles and article series to be easily found. This expands the potential of your blog enormously and gives you the ability to add a lot of information, and therefore expanding your blog making it into a real site and not just an online journal. Use pages to add an about page, contact page, popular articles page, recommendations page, photo galleries, reviews, podcasts, etc… it’s limited only by you! Just remember to keep them updated and fresh!

Links

Links or your ‘blogroll’ is a place where you can add a link to anywhere you like. Link to your other sites like your flickr page, twitter, del.icio.us, digg, or facebook page, friends and family, photoblogs, favourite sites or sites or products that you want to promote. Make categories within your links section and then you can add more than one links widget to your sidebar, one for each category? It gives you really good control over how you want to display your links.

If you look down the sidebar you’ll see that I have ’sites I like’ as my link widget and I’ve made it a combination of my other sites, my social media, family and sites or products that…well that I like!

This is the part of blogging and Wordpress that I really love! Features like these give you tremendous flexibility to customise your blog and be as creative as you want to be. I personally would never be able to do any of this with a traditional website, never mind do it so quickly.

Mandy

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