Can you tell that this blog has 41 categories and 84 tags in my tag cloud ?


I figured that it was about time to group some of my WordPress posts and show you why I am doing what I am doing. I have written a few “How To” articles but I haven’t brought them together under one roof to show you how these simple steps can help you clean-up your blog.

With this being my fifth blog and about 20th web site, I really wanted this one to have a cleaner, smoother look. It drives me nuts when I visit a blog and it takes 12 minutes to load because of all of the JavaScript gadgets in the side column, or the 4 navigation columns and one very skinny content column, or having 10 full length posts on the front page. None of that is needed, and your actually killing (through suffocation) your visitors. Navigation is very helpful. Excessive navigation is just a needle in a haystack.

For example, this blog grows every time I post a new article. Maybe I add a new tag or a new category … Maybe I use only ones … but it always grows in some fashion. I have been running this blog for about 2 months now and I have 84 tags and 41 categories, but you cannot tell that from my side columns. It could grow to over 200 categories and 10,000 tags in the next month and my side columns and header will never change.

While you are on this page, reading this article, I am going to guess that you have absolutely no interest in knowing that this blog has a sub-sub-category that contains photographs of Agate Beach in Northern California. If you wanted to look at photographs you would use the photography link in the header. There is no need to list all categories in the side column. This is the same navigational concept they use a Yahoo andd other organized web portals. The front page has a link to the “sports” section. There is no need to have links to all of the separate team pages until AFTER you have clicked through to the sports section.


So clean up your blog round 1 contains:

1. Moving Your Tag Cloud

I wrote about HOW to move your tag cloud in the article Toxic Tag Clouds. What this will allow you to do is physically move your tag cloud off your side column and place it on a page instead. This can clean up a massive amount of real estate in your side column. After you place your tag cloud on a WordPress page just place a link to it in your side column or in the header links. People who love tags can easily find your tags and you will not be creating the amazonian jungle of links in your side column.

2. Use Multiple Levels Of Categories For Better Navigation

This blog has 4 parent categories, 35 sub-categories, and 2 sub-sub categories. The only links the appear in my header links are to the 4 parent categories … tech, ramblings, writing, and photography. After you click on one of those links you will be given sub-category links to better refine your search.

Let’s use Yahoo as an example here. You go to the front of yahoo and find 4 parent categories … News, Sports, Movies, TV. You click on the Sports link and then can choose from 10 sub-categories in the header bar … let’s say these subcategories are the 10 different sports teams. You click on one of the sports teams link and you are presented with some sub-sub-category links in the header bar … players on the team, team stats, team schedule and so on. You do not need to place the “team schedule” link on the very front of Yahoo because only a very small fraction of people are going to be interested in that … yet the navigation is extremely clear so that the people who DO follow that team can quickly and easily get to that page.

I have fallen in love with subcategories because they offer much better navigation then tags. By using multiple category depths you can accomplish this navigational style. It is really the only way and should be almost considered a MUST DO.

To accomplish this goal I have written a couple of different articles. The first article that you should look at is: How To Display Subcategories & WordPress Category Templates. This article will show you how to create separate templates for each of your parent categories. We are using separate templates because it allows us to display the subcategories that are the children of that particular category. Again, clean, simple navigation is what we are going for.

The second article is How To Display WordPress SubCategories: Descendant Function. This article will show you how to display the subcategories that are under the parent category of the article you are currently reading. For example, this article is in the tech category so I would only want to display “tech” subcategories. Again, it would be a mess if I included all 35 of my subcategories, but to include the directly related categories is good for navigation. Read your reader’s mind and give them what is most related to their interests. You can see an example of this in the Related Posts section at the bottom of this post.

The third article deals with How To Exclude Certain Categories From Menus. This is very useful in presenting a clean navigational menu. There in no need to display second or third level subcategories before your visitor has gone to the first level sub category. It only creates confusion and an overwhelming number of links.

3. Widget and Plugin Madness !

You will notice in the above article that we are doing a lot of hand coding to accomplish these goals. You may be asking yourself why we are not using widgets and plugins. The answer, for me, is a simple one … flexibility. I don’t want to use sidebar widgets because my whole goal is to clean-up the sidebar, not add more to it. As for general plugins, many of them lack flexibility. They may do one or two of the things I was looking for but very rarely will they accomplish everything.

In addition, when you hand-code something you have the option to NOT place the code in certain locations. I can place these little code changes anywhere I want in my template files, BUT I also have the option to leave these functions off certain OTHER pages or sub-template files. I can also place the code anywhere I would like to on the page. For example, if you visit my “Photos By Geographic Location” in the photography section you notice a double navigational menu. If I so desire I could easily remove the second menu without affecting the first menu. How ? Because they are not controlled by a single master “plugin” program.



So get out there and clean-up those blogs. Get your navigational menus in order. Let your visitors just flow through your site. Trust me, you don’t want to have to force them to find their way through the jungle.

For example, take a peek at the mess I have going on in my last blog … Lohman Trading. In the next month or so I will really need to attend to this blog. The navigation is overwhelming. I will be applying all of the techniques mentioned above !


Hopefully this article has been a help to those of us who are not “code” addicts. I like to pass-along tidbits of information that might allow non-programmers the ability to modify their own websites. Please keep in mind that I am not a professional programmer but I have been building and modifying websites since 1995 using HTML, cgi, perl, MIVA, PHP, and CSS. Suggestions on other ways to reach the desired goals above are always welcome … please consider leaving a comment !

Always remember to save copies of your original files BEFORE you modify them. This will allow you to easily revert your web site if the changes do not work.

Comments ( leave a comment here ) and thoughts ALWAYS welcome !

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Related Posts:

• * How To Hide WordPress Subcategories From Display


• * How To Display Subcategories & WordPress Category Templates


• * WordPress Loop Inside Of A Loop


• * How To Display WordPress SubCategories: Descendant Function


• * Modifying The Posts Per Page Query In WordPress

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