[tentblogger-vimeo 15736274]
[This post is part of the Ultimate Guide to Launching a WordPress-Powered Blog series.]
[Like the quality of the screencast? I use the Screenflow app for it!]
Watch the above video for my thoughts on how to choose the right categories for your new blog.
Not what you thought? Hah!
There’s certainly some strategy (that we’ll discuss much later) in choosing the right categories long term but ultimately do not worry at all in the beginning about your categories.
Just start creating content. That’s your biggest goal, and if categorization stops you from doing just that then keep them “Uncategorized”!
You’ll be constantly pruning your categories as your blog grows!
Want a really robust post on how to decide on your blog categories? Make sure to check this post here!
[This post is part of the Ultimate Guide to Launching a WordPress-Powered Blog series.]
We started blogging six years ago. We didn’t have kids or jobs (students), so everything felt like it was either uncategorized or simply fit under the “Life” category.
Now, six years later, we’ve got a house, jobs, kids, and more than a thousand posts with no categories. Oops.
My point? Even if you don’t have categories planned, go ahead and tag your posts from the beginning. Create content, then tag it according to what you’ve written. Eventually, you might have to go back and re-organize your tags, but at least you’ll have a starting point.
As for me, I’ve got a thousand posts, and I have no idea what each specific post is about. I have to go back, read each one, and then tag it. No wonder I’m procrastinating…
wow! that’s a lot…!
yes, you need to do some pruning… it’ll help TREMENDOUSLY!
I had to chuckle when I saw this post title come across Twitter, since I just had a conversation with our school administrator this morning about he and I needing to come up with categories before we launch the new school blog.
I understand your points, John, and the advice to not let the category decision paralyze you is good. But I’m going to cling to my requirement to start with a list of categories, for a couple of reasons:
1) It helps remind contributors of the scope and purpose of the blog. I’m launching a blog for a school, and I could have over a dozen authors in the first few months, contributing only rarely. I’ve already met with the teachers about the scope and purpose, but I want to make sure that the authors don’t drift away from that purpose. The categories are being created out of an understanding of what we plan to do with the site, and who we’re targeting. I want to be able to turn the contributors loose, but have confidence that we’re all headed in the same direction, even months from now.
2) Categories communicate something about the site to the visitors. So do tag clouds, of course. But a good category list says “here’s what you can find on this blog.” Or for new blogs, it says “here’s what we plan to do with this blog.” There are indeed other ways to communicate those messages, but I think categories help.
Again, I understand and appreciate the advice. And I’m certainly not saying that my way is better or right. It’s just where I stand today, as I work with ministries to launch new blogs.
brian,
that’s why i said for “new blogs”… and yes, your situation warrants it with a multi-author blog. that’s great.
it’ll be interesting to see what you think of my opinion of tags when it comes up…
I am the website admin/station manager for our student run radio station at school. (http://wngrradio.com/) We currently have 30+ posts, but three categories. Does anyone here have suggestions for more categories? I try to use tags for band names, and album names, and Categories for more general topics.
News? Reviews? Interviews?
All of which are things I will be adding to the site at some point. Thanks for the help John!
great!
Great tips…thanks John
I have 78 posts, 15 categories, and 24 tags. I will be interested to see how that fits in with what you will say about tags. Right now “Just for Fun” and “Random” are the only ones that have only 1-3 posts in them. “Leadership” has only one, but I intend to write more in that category.
I may need to prune my categories to focus my writing a little more.
pruning consistently is a healthy activity!
I have a gazillion categories. Trimmed them down to a handful.
Then I started a new blog. That now has me only ever using one category on the old blog and everything else on the new.
Kind of the intention
hah! glad you trimmed the first one down…
I’ve sort of been of the impression that you use categories to generate broad areas of your blog with common themes, and that the tags are useful for more in depth “categorisation” of posts.
neat. i’ll talk about the two and give you my opinion on it!
I would like to set up dedicated feeds for a category. Can I do this easily?
it’s not too hard and most themes have it built right-in:
http://tentblogger.com/get-started/feed/
just add /feed/ to the end of the category!
As always, you are awesome. I just purchased the Standard theme, and haven’t had a chance to look under the hood yet, but I’m sure this feature is in there… *wink wink*
John,
This doesn’t seem to work, not even on your site. It looks like Feedburner “takes over” and redirects the feed to the main “all posts” feed.
I tried plugging in your category feed:
http://tentblogger.com/get-started/feed/
to Google reader, and it gives me all the posts, not just that category.
I even tried http://feeds.feedburner.com/tentblogger/get-started/feed/
That didn’t work either.
Am I doing something wrong?
Weeelll,
I figured it out.
For some reason, Feedburner commandeers all the feeds from the site, even the category and tag feeds that WordPress creates, and sends them to the one feed you have set up in Feedburner.
So, there are two options. I’m not sure this first one works, since I didn’t try it. Apparently, you can create a separate Feedburner feed for each category if you want to. This seemed like kind of a pain for me, so I didn’t do it.
The other option…(sorry to bring this up here in light of your recently released Feedburner plugin)… is to install the FD Feedburner Plugin. It has this option: “Do not redirect category or tag feeds.” Once I installed this plugin, and selected that option, the feeds worked fine, just as you stated above.
that can work! i’m looking to expand this plugin so good deal.
Great. I have it installed, so I will watch your updates with interest.
On another note. My “incoming links” area in the Dashboard stopped working on 2/11/2010, the day after I set up my blog in Google Webmaster tools following your advice on this bog. Is there any connection that you are aware of? Are your incoming links still working in the back end dashboard?
I mean 02/11/2011.
nope. not that i’m aware of. that’s interesting.
I went through my GWT settings very carefully again, and noticed that I had entered both “www.tillhecomes.org” and “tillhecomes.org” as domains, but had only verified the first. So, I verified the other, and now my incoming links are working again. I don’t know why that would make a difference, and maybe it really didn’t, but oh well…they’re working now.
interesting. are you not choosing to use just one? you should opt to use either http:// or www instead of both. this is a seo best practice.
When I originally added my site to GWT, I used the www. Then later, I added a subdomain, and so put a new entry into GWT without the www. Now, I am trying to organize and plan better and it’s causing bugs. I’ll get them all worked out eventually. Your blog is helping quite a bit. Thank you.
OFFTOPIC: How did you do the app grouping in the OS X Dashboard in your screencast? Just transparent icons on a dummy app?
that’s a post here: http://tentblogger.com/dock-spacers/
Great advice John. I have been trying to think of categories and it has stopped me from writing. I need to try the write first, sort later method.
or curate as you go…!