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How to Organize Your WordPress Blog

Categorizing your posts in WordPress provides an organizational structure for your blog. Each blog post that is assigned to a category is grouped with other posts in the same category. When your blog is a few months old, this structure creates a nice topical directory of posts for you and your readers. Category lists generally appear in two places on your blog, letting your readers find all your posts by subject very easily. Almost all WordPress themes list categories within the blog post itself. Most themes also provide a list of your categories in the sidebar of your blog so that your readers can click a topic of interest.

Each category in a WordPress.com blog has its own RSS feed, making it easy for your readers to subscribe to a feed and keep updated on what you have to say in your blog about a certain topic.

You can create new categories and organize your content within them by following these steps:

1

Click the Categories link on the Posts menu.

The Categories page opens.

2

Type the name of your category in the Category Name text box.

Categories you create now aren’t set in stone. You can edit or delete them by revisiting the Categories page and clicking the name of the category you want to edit. The Edit Category page opens, and you can edit the category name, category parent, and description.

3

Leave the Category Parent drop-down menu set to the default option (None).

The Category Parent drop-down menu lets you create subcategories. If you have a main category called Books, for example, Books appears in the Category Parent drop-down menu. To create a subcategory of the Books category, follow Steps 1 and 2 and then choose Books from the Category Parent drop-down menu.

4

(Optional) Enter a description of the category in the Description text box.

Do this step now so that later, you’ll know what you were thinking of when you created this category. A short summary will do. (Also, some WordPress themes are coded to display the category description in the sidebar of your blog.)

5

Click the Add Category button.

That’s all it takes to create a category. Continue with the rest of the steps to categorize posts you have already created.

6

(Optional) Click the Posts link in the Posts menu.

The Posts page appears, displaying a list of posts you’ve made.

7

Click the name of the post you want to categorize and in the Categories section, select the check box next to the category for your post.

You can select more than one category and subcategory. You can also use the Categories section before you publish a new post to assign it to the categories you’d like.

8

Scroll up to the top of the Edit Post page, and click the Update Post button.

WordPress.com refreshes the Edit Post page, displaying the post you just edited; it reflects the changes you just made.

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