Improve my blog navigations
The first time I find that my blog is a bit clunky in terms of blog navigations is when August 1st rolls in. That’s when I find the calendar from my sidebar only shows this month’s post. So if there is only one post on the calendar, it will only show one post on the sidebar.
To find my previous posts, I would have to click on the July at the top of the calendar. That requires an additional click and furthermore not intuitive. Although you can use the search functions to search for the post you want to read, I want to make it easier for my readers to find what they want. That’s when I decide to tweak my blog navigations.
I decide upon a three pronged attack:
- Clean up my labels – include limited broad categories
- Add Popular Posts to sidebar
- Add Related post to bottom of each post
Clean up my labels
I find that the labels on my sidebars are too haphazard. They are single word labels that don’t mean anything without the context. I will decide on some broad categories like Blogging or Writing Contents that will describe a range of posts. This will also help in my third point about related post. Currently, I have not done so and plan to do this on the weekends. Alternatively, if I can find a script for tag cloud, I might use them.
Add Popular Posts to sidebar
I will add some of my popular posts as determined by statcounter. Currently, I am doing everything by hand (ie. copy/paste). I plan to update this once a week. as this is quite tedious, I need to search for a script or a widget to do this for me. Any suggestions?
Related post at the end of post
I have started to add in related post so that after reading current post, you will be able to see post that is related to this topic. Again, I am doing this by hand. My disorganized labels doesn’t help too. Makes it difficult even to look for my own post.
I know that the self hosted Wordpress.org have plugins that can help tremendously in this area. You can read Lorelle’s blog post about related wordpress plugins here.
I wonder if I am reaching the bottleneck for the free hosted Blogger and move on to hosted server and Wordpress.org.
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August 13th, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Excellent advice–areas I don’t spend enough time on. Recently I switched my Word Sell blog from Blogger to WordPress (www.wordsellinc.com). I switched for different reasons (to have a unique domain, mainly), but the related post feature on the new blog is awesome.
August 14th, 2007 at 9:20 am
Yes, I know the related post plugin in wordpress is wonderful. Now, I am doing all the legwork myself. But I am still not sure of using paid hosting.