Michael Martin wrote a great post on Problogger on using categories and tags effectively on your blog.
Categories are best imagined as a paper filing system. Each page in the system must be filed away in the appropriate drawer. There are only a set number of drawers, and so each must cover a rather wide blanket.
The addition of tags in WordPress 2.3 really brings the popular blogging tool closer to becoming a full fledged CMS. Categories can now be used to distinguish sections of your site rather than describing the content you are writing about.
A good example: TXP uses “sections” within the site to separate content. Instead of having 25 sections of your site that only contain 2-3 posts you should be able to cut the categories down to a few general ones and use tags to separate your content further.
2 Comments
Glad you enjoyed the post Will. I like how you’ve summed up the usage of categories there. That’s it exactly.
Thanks Michael. I really liked the post. I had been thinking the same thing a few days before reading it. Well done.