BloggingAmigos

Chalupa and I spent some time last night talking about how best to organize this site for users. We have very different category/tag setups on our individual blogs, and with so many authors here, we needed to figure something out quickly.

Note to you folks just getting started - think about organization BEFORE you get going. It’ll save you time and headaches down the road.

You can organize your blog any way you want to. You can use pages instead of categories, categories instead of tags, any of those alone, or all of them together. Usually a combination of categories and tags does the trick.

What’s going to be the most useful organization of content for your readers? My thoughts on the matter:

• Most users will look for some kind of heirarchy.
• People browse content most easily when it’s organized in general groups.
• Folks aren’t going to spend a lot of time looking for something. If they can’t find it right away, they’ll move on to someone else’s site. There are a LOT of people blogging out there - chances are you’re not the only one writing what you’re writing.

There has been a lot of research suggesting that people can retain more information (and, relevant here, can FIND information in less time) when it’s “chunked” - divided - into intuitive groupings. An intuitive grouping for most humans is a hierarchy.

Think, also, about the way categories and tags display on your platform. In Wordpress, for example, unless you seriously tweak things, your categories and subcategories will display in a list. You don’t want a list that makes your page scroll for miles, so it makes sense to limit the number of categories and subcategories you use. Tags, on the other hand, display in a cloud - meaning you can have a LOT of tags and still won’t take up tons of vertical space on the page. So, WP users might use tags for more specific labeling/grouping.

Another note: Don’t categorize or tag so specifically that only one post/article is going to use the category/tag. Make sure that you’re general enough, even in your specific labels, that you can reuse them - remember that you’re grouping (or “chunking”) things.

I decided to use this hierarchy for our category/tag structure: categories to group posts by general topic, and tags to label them by specific topic/content. Example: this post deals with, on a high level, organizing your blog content, and specifically working with tags and categories. So this post goes in Category: Administration and Organization and is tagged with “tags” and “categories”.

So… two things to take away:

• Organize content so it’s easy and quick for your READERS to get around (even if it’s not the way you think).
• Think through the organization of your content before you go any further - it’ll save you some serious time.