Take a moment to organise your content

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Imagine trying to find one blog entry on a site that has hundreds or even thousands of pages.  How do you do it?

The problem with searching.

Have you ever searched Google and found a site you like, but you forget to bookmark it and then you can't find it again?  Happens to me all the time...

As a site grows, searching your site will yield different results.  If you publish your first blog entry about blogging, you can find it by searching for "blogging".  But what if you start writing about blogging a lot more and you can't find a very specific blog entry with a search query that used to work just fine?

This is exactly what's happened with my blog, so it's time to look at how I can organise things a bit better.

Structuring your site.

Even if you stay very focused, many blogs are quite broad and not everyone will want to read everything, nor will they have time to.

On many blogging platforms, such as WordPress and Blogger, you can use categories to organise your content.  These categories allow readers to find similar content on your site without having to trawl through loads of unrelated content.

A logical structure on your site will make it far easier to navigate your content.  I would like to start organising my blog and I may set myself an objective to sort it out soon.

A drawback with blogs.

In What's at the heart of your site?, I stressed the importance of choosing the right system for your site.  Starting with a blog then trying to add other bits and pieces later can lead to a disorganised mess.

Although blogs allow you to organise content into categories and you can also add standalone pages for things like an About page or a Links page, a complex site structure is just not going to happen in most blogging systems.

Have a look at my Music section.  You'll see some images - these represent the albums I have composed so far, along with a couple of extra sections.  Clicking on an image will take you into that album.  You can listen to tracks in the music player on the left, you can download the tracks on the right, or you can click on a track name to read a bit about it and leave a comment.

I don't believe this kind of complex hierarchy is possible with tools like WordPress or Blogger.  I could put each album on its own page, but I don't think it would be as easy to find your way through the site as it is now.  What do you think?

If you only have a blog, that's OK!

If you are a "pure" blogger, as in someone who blogs but doesn't want or need to put anything else online, then a blogging system may be all you need.  You can organise your content into categories and leave it at that.

But even if this is the route you take, how easy is it to find your way around a site if each category has hundreds of pages in it?

Think ahead - it's better to start organising your site before it gets so huge that you don't stand a chance of restoring some order.

What do you think?

How do you organise your blog?
Do you have a complex site structure?
How does your blogging system fare when it comes to keeping things organised?

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