Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
5
8.
Continue editing the checked and unchecked categories to assign your post appropriately.
9.
When you're done categorizing your post, click the arrow next to the Categories header to hide
the categories and open up more room for editing.
Managing Categories
WordPress not only allows you to assign and create categories on the fly, but it also includes a
whole interface just for managing them. This kind of thoroughness is part of the reason WordPress
has surged to its current leading position among blogging tools, so you might as well take
advantage.
Don't let the availability of powerful tools tempt you into overdoing it, though. As mentioned earlier,
we recommend that you use as few as four categories, and try hard to keep the total at a dozen or
fewer. More than that is hard for your blog visitors to parse and for you to manage successfully.
WordPress also allows you to create subcategories. We recommend that you resist. Categories
should be deeper than they are broad; that is, there should be more entries in a typical category
than there are categories. This suggests that a reasonable number of top-level categories should be
able to handle at least a couple of hundred posts.
What's more, web users are extremely impatient. The typical visitor to your blog will consider him-
self or herself to have done very well indeed to have looked through your category list and chosen a
category to click on. If another level of categories then appears, then one frustrating reality, and two
nearly intolerable possibilities, will occur to your visitor:
•
Reality
—The user has to make another choice.
•
Possibility 1
—The user might have to make
yet another
choice after that one.
•
Possibility 2
—The user might have gone down the wrong branch of a tree that's suddenly
revealing itself to be rather complicated, and might have to make
many more
choices up and
down the hierarchy to find what he or she is looking for, if it exists at all.
There are, of course, exceptions—for instance, if the subcategories
are both obvious and well defined. If you've divided a list of classic
pop songs into vinyl, tape, and CD, it might be logical to have 33s,
45s, and 78s for the vinyl category and 8-track and cassette for the
tapes. These subcategories are so obvious that they won't cause
your blog visitors undue confusion or anxiety. In such a case, con-
sider first making them all top-level categories, but you might in
this instance choose to use subcategories.
Most blog posts, though, don't lend themselves to such rigid cate-
gorization. Most blog categories are naturally fuzzy—so all the bet-
ter if they're both simple and few.
caution
Yahoo! lost its one-time lead-
ership in the web search
market partly because it
relied on complex categoriza-
tion schemes to organize
web content. Don't repeat
their mistake on your blog;
keep your categorization
scheme simple and, prefer-
ably, single-level.
