DMBMMLF: Day 4 – Navigation

This is Day 4 in a 10-day blog series called “Does My Blog Make Me Look Fat? Ten Days. Ten Small Actions. One Great Blog”

Today will be a little lighter than the past 3 days. Again, I apologize if I’m overloading you with information. I guess I underestimated my gabbiness. I think the last 7 days will be easier to handle.

How visitors find things on your site – your pages and posts – make up your navigation.

Most sites have a main navigation bar across the top or on the left side of the page where it’s easy to see.

The same goes for a lot of WordPress templates.

There’s usually some sort of navigation across the top (usually below your logo/site name) that has all your pages in it. You don’t have to do much but start creating pages for them to show up in the navigation

Widgets can take care of the navigation as well. These are found in your Admin under Appearance > Widgets.

• You can add a Pages widget which will list all your pages in order.
• A Categories widget will list all the post categories.
• The Archives widget will list all the months you’ve blogged and a link to each months’ posts.
• And there’s a Tag Cloud widget which will cluster all your tags and the bigger they are, the more posts are associated with them.

We’ll get into how to use Tags & Categories properly tomorrow, so for now we’ll concentrate on how your visitors find your content once they’re on your blog.

If you’re running a blog for your business, you probably have several pages regarding your services, who you are and how to contact you.

The easiest and most accessible spot for these links is across the TOP of your site.

As I said before, most themes have this ability. If you’re just blogging for yourself and NOT your business, I still recommend you have at least an about and a contact page.

Quick tip: You can change the order of your Pages by editing a page and changing the “Order” box on the right hand side under “Attributes.” This is a little buggy still so play around with your page order to find what works best.

Next I recommend you add the search feature on your page. Some themes come with the search built in to the theme itself, but in most cases you can add it using the Search widget.

Lastly, choose one secondary way for people to find your posts. It’s not all that necessary to have the Archives, Categories, Tags and Calendar widgets on your sidebars.

Select one that makes the most sense to you.

I do not recommend using the Calendar or the Archives though. The calendar doesn’t really add much but clutter in my opinion, and isn’t all that useful. The Archives can be handled through an Archives page.

To create an archives page you need to make sure your theme has an Archives template.

You’ll find “Templates” under the Attributes section on the right side of the Page editor.

If you click the drop-down and it has something that resembles the words “Archives Template,” you’re in luck.

Just create a new page titled “Archive,” set the template to “Archives” or whatever it’s called, and publish.

You should have a new page that lists all your posts. Cool, huh? 

Now not all templates have an archives template, so YMMV (your mileage may vary).

So your assignment for today, should you choose to accept it is to find someone who hasn’t seen your site before and ask them to find a few things:

• Your about page
• The very first post on your blog
• Any post from a month ago
• A post that has a Tag of your choosing.

Try to observe them doing this and see where they have trouble. Then ask them how easy/hard it was to find each item.

And if you have enough energy, take some of the stuff you learned today and fix the problem areas.

Don’t forget to Subscribe to the blog or sign up below to get the next 6 days delivered to your inbox. Remember, I’ll be offering all this as an eBook at the end of the series and folks who sign up will be the first to know (and get a sweet discount).

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This post is part of the Does My Blog Make Me Look Fat: Ten Days. Ten Small Actions. One Great Blog Series. Here are the rest:
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