Too many categories May 11, 17:24
Some of you bloggers drive me nuts with your categories numbering in the hundreds. Honestly, who needs more than a small handful of categories (with emphasis placed on small)? Personally I blame it on Wordpress (which also causes world hunger and road rage). If not for the ability to add as many categories as you please to each blog then we wouldn’t be in this pickle and I wouldn’t have a chronic twitch in my right eye.
Categories are meant to aid people in browsing, having 20 or more categories on a single blog can confuse even the most web-savvy of people and it just looks messy. I don’t particularly care having to guess whether you filed a tutorial under “how-to” or “tutorial” or hey, maybe even “help” and if you filed it under all of them then that begs the question: WHY?
Some of the advantages of having only a few categories are:
- You don’t have to remember all of your personal categories. Just file it under personal!
- Visitors can browse your categories and actually see posts related to that category instead of just one or two.
- It looks cleaner than having a few dozen categories listed under each blog.
Try cutting down your category usage to only two categories, pick your categories carefully and, if need be, create new ones. Use only two categories for a week and try going back to using twenty or more, you might be surprised.
One of the best examples of category bloat is Lovestoned.nu. On her latest blog she has 20 categories, 9 of which are dedicated to her personal life. I could cut those 20 categories down to 5, 2 for myself.
If you must file your blogs under everything imaginable then why don’t you consider using tags1, although it will probably fall victim to the same thing your categories did. In the end KISS (keep it simple stupid).
1 Textpattern: CHH Keywords, Wordpress: Ultimate Tag Warrior, Cutenews: A Cutenews tag cloud?, Movable Type: Tags
I have 35 categories, and add more every once in a while. When I blog once or twice a day about a million different topics, how is someone supposed to find a certain post?
Say I grouped everything under three categories like you hint at – “Online”, “Personal”, “Other”. What if you wanted to find that one post I made about Brazilian waxing back in February? Do you click on “personal” then go back 20+ pages to find it? Or do you click on “Health” in the sidebar and go back one page?
I know which I would prefer.
I agree with this post, obviously. I think 10 or 15 categories is pushing it. Categories are supposed to group things together, not single them out, if you catch my drift.
Amanda would have made a good point, except she forgot the amazingness that is the search feature.
Earlier I didn’t even want to have categories shown in my sidebar, and when I placed them there it was quite a long list. Now I have 7 most important categories visible.
I think it’s silly to have one post under 20 tags which all seem quite same (somebody tell me why there has to be so many tags?).
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Hi I'm Becky, often referred to as The Knitting Hillbilly and Pussybear, owner of this site and general nuisance. I'm a knitter, serial complainer, known whistle blower and I run the ever popular
Wow… I am actually in shock at the amount of categories Lovestoned.nu has! That is absolutely ridiculous. Your blog made me ashamed that before I have had about 4 categories for a blog… but that’s nothing compared to around 20!
I did decide to cut my list down considerably the other day, now I find that I haven’t got enough but I agree with you, it’s better to add new categories for specific blogs if need be than have so many different ones.
#1 Kate May 12, 11:24 Permalink