Blogging Expertise

Organizing or managing your blog is an important ongoing task and is something you should master before long. As you’ve probably noticed with the few elements we have looked at so far, WordPress is an adaptable and straightforward application to use, and its management is no more difficult. We’ll begin with one of the most important navigational elements of your blog, Revision—or…

Editorial Control

We’ve all done it… You save a post and as you click “Publish”, you see a silly typo. Oops. Well, you need to go back to the post and correct the error. How?

There are several options, but the one which is relevant to this tutorial is using the “Manage” interface. In the light blue navigation, you’ll see the word “Manage”; click on it and the page will refresh. By default this area shows all your posts, fifteen at a time. From this interface you can “View”, “Edit” and “Delete” as well as see important information about each post, including which categories they belong to. In the case of editing a post that is already published, click on “Edit” and you’ll be back in the already familiar “Write> Post” page.

Love Cats

There is no doubt that your readership will be reading your blog for its content; for example, say your blog is called “Truffalo” and is about planting hazels and oaks in Australia to cultivate truffles. You’ll have a natural audience; maybe it will be of three people, but they will be out there. And while the blog itself is a series of entries, you can categorize those entries to make sense of the content for your audience, as well as for yourself and those nice people, the Search Engines. In the case of “Truffalo” you might have categories on White Truffles, Black Truffles, Hazels, Oaks, Children’s Stories, Australian Growers, Breeds of Truffling Pigs, etc., etc. and each of your posts might be about one, some or all of these topics, in which case you should categorize them as such, using as many categories as are applicable.

Note: Bloggers often tend to place an entry in only one category, thinking this is the most useful way of using Categories. By categorizing a post in several different ways, that post is accessible in several different archives. This does two things: it exposes the blog to more people, but it also exposes the story in different ways more often to the search engines. This is a good thing and counts as a proper Search Engine Optimization strategy.

But how to set these up? Well, it is all fine and dandy to add them while you are writing a post (and I do this all the time), but what if you want to change the spelling of an old one, or delete one? Still within the Manage tab of the light blue bar, click on “Categories”. The page refreshes and (are you seeing the pattern?) you get a table of all the categories in your blog, in the case of “Truffalo”, at least eight.

Addition

As my note about Search Engine Optimization suggests you can never have enough categories—the more the better, within reason, as each one will generate a separate archive page full of its own array of articles. My rule of thumb is to create a category if I can see myself attaching it to four or more posts. So let’s add a category! Click the large link in brackets, “add new”, the page refreshes and you have a very simple form.

1. “Category name” is the name that will be displayed on your home page, and on the archive pages—it is best to use something directly descriptive rather than an esoteric phrase, so in general “Black Truffles” will be better than “Luxurious Noir”(!).
2. Next, we have “Category Slug”. Sometimes used for plugins, slugs can be used to filter and order articles—they’re also generated automatically, so don’t worry about filling this out.
3. “Category Parent” is left at “None” by default; however it can be a useful way of defining hierarchies of information. An example using our Truffle site would be to have a category called “Truffles” and sub-categories called “Black”, “White” and “Mythological”. This is by no means an often-used facility, but can be useful if you have several contributors to a blog and want to control where and how the information is displayed.
4. “Category Description” can be used in one of three ways: as a reference to you and any other contributors, to ensure that all blog entries are correctly classified; as a contributory description tag for search engines, adding another level to your search engine optimization by adding more keywords to your already burgeoning default collection; and lastly, as a description to your readership.

An example, for our “Truffle> Mythological” category might be: “Posts about the capture and cultivation of unconfirmed Truffle-types, such as the silver, Monserrat’s and the Chinese Heavenly Mouse Brain Truffle.” Okay, so all of that is a little far-fetched, but the principle is correct, using all the relevant keywords while ensuring it is properly descriptive of the subject area.

Once you are happy with the category details you have added, simply press “Add” and you’re done. Your category won’t appear in your sidebar until you have a post in that category, so don’t be disappointed that it isn’t immediately available; just write a post for it! Or even add one of your existing posts to that category.

Editing or changing categories is exactly the same, and recommended when you have created a new category during work on a post.

Note: Categories can be manipulated in all sorts of ways, often with plugins but sometimes, and in my view more effectively, using the pre-loaded parameters in PHP. While this is beyond the scope of WordPress 101, there will be a point where you will want to start tweaking the way the theme you are using deals with categories and when this happens, it is always better to have a whole host of categories than justt three or four.

Keep on top of your categories and posts, and you’ll see more traffic—and more importantly, you’ll make things easier for your readers.

Next, Being Static and Sticky.