Getting Your Categories Straight
Beginner bloggers, beware the category trap!
It’s all too easy to start going a little crazy with those categories after a few posts. Usually, the first several posts are all assigned to one of only a few categories, but then something happens. It’s almost as if the blogger’s plug gets yanked, and suddenly it seems that the posts in the blogger’s head need ever more discrete and finely tuned categories. And the result? Almost always unhappy - way too many categories, categories that are ill-defined and duplicative, or categories that are way too narrowly drawn.
Spend some time at the outset thinking about your categories. How many do you really need? I would suggest starting with no more than ten. Craft them carefully; think ahead about your posts and your subject matter.
One approach is to create a broad-stroke outline of your subject matter. If you were writing a book, what would your chapter titles be? Write them down on paper, or in a text file. Play with them a bit. Aim for a little bit of parallelism (though strict symmetry certainly isn’t required).
Whatever you do, try to avoid what usually happens to beginner bloggers - call it putting the cart before the horse: draft a post, then write a category title. That way madness and haphazard categorization lie.
Finally, don’t confuse categories with tags! Use plugins like The Ultimate Tag Warrior to define and label your posts in more narrow ways; let your categories serve their purpose which is to group them according to subtopic.
