This second part (part 1 is here) of the “5 steps to a better blog” series focusses on letting users find your content. It talks about some measures you can take in order to guarantee that even old posts get the attention they deserve. While the first part was a little more practical and discussed correct typography usage for the web, this one goes into how things should be organized and located in order to actually be found by your blog readers.

The front page dilemma: A huge problem with weblogs and how they work relies on the front page and navigation. Naturally, you are limited to a certain number of articles you can show when people visit your blog, so what it will show is the last few articles you’ve written. This leaves in the dark all the other content you’ve written before if you don’t take proper measures.

Categorization and archive browsing:

Lets talk about categorization, then. Categorization is about assigning keywords to blog posts, usually with the topics the posts refer to. Like in the case of this article, I’ve assigned it the categories “Design”, “Usability” and “Web 2.0″. What this allows me though, is much more important than the categorization act in the first place. This allows me (with some help from my blogging engine) to give my users the possibility to browse based on topics they’re interested on.

My blog in particular focusses on things that tightly connect to each other most of the times, but most of the new age bloggers write about everything, sometimes mixing web development with dog food (fact). Most people browse blogs for a reason - to read about the topics they care about. This means they may only be interested in what you have to say about web development, or (what the heck), dog food.

Thats where category browsing comes in handy. In fact, its so handy that it should be one of the most important things in a blog, apart from the content itself. It allows readers to filter through what they don’t want to read and get to the posts they’re really looking for. Remember we’re trying to fight against frustration of not finding relevant content. Frustration makes people leave.

So now that we know how important it is, how do we use categories properly? Here’s a few hints:

• Assign meaningful categories to your posts. Remember categories are ways to catalogue your content by topics.
• As you’re probably writing about a few topics only, limit the number of categories you use, so your users don’t get confused amidst them.
• As a rule of thumb, if you’ve used more than 5 categories a given post, two things may be wrong: you have low grain control over your categories (there’s too many of them), or your post talks about a whole lot of things (which is wrong by nature - remember users are picky, don’t mix things)

Displaying the archives:

One problem with some weblogs is that even though they use proper categorization, they don’t give the necessary emphasis to their category navigation - making their old posts exactly that: old. One of such examples is the well known simplebits. Dan Cederholm has great taste and skills in webdesign and web standards, but his “notebook” section is poorly organized, even if it is one of the most important parts of his website.

His problem is the problem of many others. He’s placed date archives on top of the categories navigation - meaning its hard to find content by topics. The problem with this approach is that people don’t browse by dates but by content relevance.

This makes the browsing experience frustrating, because people are presented with a list of months of what could actually be good content (in Dan’s case, it is undoubtedly great content), but they won’t even bother browsing back in time without knowing what they’ll be reading about.

Here are some thoughts about where to place category information:

• Every post should have the categories it belongs to in clear sight, linking to the archive for that particular category so people can find more content about that subject
• Category navigation should be placed next to your navigation or where your links are - in most cases, that would be a sidebar. It should be placed as next to the top as possible
• If you use a sidebar to navigate your blog, remember the order of things you look for when browsing for information, and act accordingly. First, the categories, then dates, then everything else.

Wrapping up, and some other tips

While the main focus of this article was to explain the benefits of categories in blogs and how to take advantage of them, there’s a couple more things that you need to take care of when helping people find your content. These are some of basic usability concepts that people sometimes forget about on the web:

• Always guide your readers. Make sure your page title tells them where they are and how to go some place else on your website.
• Don’t link to the page the user is at in any location without at least making the link different. People will often become confused if they see a link pointing to the place they believe they’re at, and frustrated if they click it and end up in the same page.
• Use different colors in links for visited content, so the users have some thing to guide them subconsciously between information they read before and what’s new.

These tips, as well as the tips on categorization and archive linking will make sure your users are always up to date with new content while still being able to browse older posts if the topics are of interest to them. Never forget that the posts behind your homepage also exist, and are probably important to some people. Otherwise you wouldn’t have written them in the first place, would you?

A thought to keep: avoid frustration at all times.