Confession Time… you know the scenario, you have a brilliant idea, you rush to implement it with more enthusiasm than good sense, and after some time the penny slowly drops that maaayybe you haven’t quite thought things through.
Hmm, Revise said idea… Hey that took no time at all, quick fix, Why didn’t that occur to me before? Yippee.
Happy, done good… worked for a while and the show is on the road, I’ll do a bit more tomorrow. That’s Good right?
Wrong... the gray matter starts ticking over and I realise that I’ve left out a few essential elements. Really essential elements.
Back to the drawing board. …Well it’s actually more like back to the 4th draft and the 3rd-work-in-progress since I’ve been messing with part of it already. Now I have to figure out if it takes less time to re-hash what I’ve been messing with or to try and go back to the beginning, …get my drift?
If you are lost by now, so am I… what started out as a brainwave is steadily becoming brainfade, I’ve found myself in a hole and realised that digging deeper probably isn’t the wisest move. I need help. Your help.
“Me???” you squawk in surprise, (or gasp, or squeal or ….insert whatever fits best) oops that last bit kind of came out wrong but you know what I mean LOL.
Yes, your help … … You.
My problem is a simple one… I need your opinion Dear Reader.
First let me explain the problem… I’ve been working on my Blog’s “Categories” List. Now obviously if this were a music blog then my list would read something easy and logical like ” 1940′s, 1030′s, 194o’s, 1950′s etc” or ” rock ‘n roll, hip hop, jazz, classical” …
But I blog about a mixture of things: specialist foods, recipes and recipe tutorials, crafts, The Netherlands, family stuff, and our travels to various countries and the stuff we find, where we eat, places we visit…
When I first started blogging my “Categories” were vague because I hadn’t posted much, I didn’t foresee back then how the lists of posts would grow… all of a sudden I realised that some topic headings were hiding whole families of sub-topics within them, heck not just families of sub-topics, but small nations of them.
If I do a filter on any part, I get a long list.. take “United States of America” per our trip there last year… 25 entries correspond (and maybe more if I didn’t forget to add USA to the category list when I made a post).
So how does an interested reader find the food specialties we discovered, in an easy fashion from the posts on accommodation tips, the reviews of eating establishments, the sights we visited, general observations and information etc?
Bear in mind that I travel rather a lot, you may substitute a number of country names for “USA” and in each country I want to try and break down the list so that someone interested in say: Local Specialties only, can find all those posts easily.
So… I in my haste I started to add “sub-categories… the list swiftly becomes long and I’ve realised that I have so much information to add that even if I manage to fit it all into my front page that it’s maybe looking a bit daunting… Or is it? Have I just been looking too hard and can only now see the mess?
Maybe other WordPress Themes have better ways of making the Categories, so that if you click on “France” then you’d get a separate drop-down menu, with subgroups… but I love the theme and layout I have, and anyway I’m not convinced that the deficiency is with my Theme, I think it’s with me and my detail fanatic brain.
I think I have been looking too hard and too long, I don’t have a clear enough idea of what the best End Result should look like so it’s like trying to drive your car in pitch dark with all the lights off.
Clearly there should be a Plan or at least some kind of rough idea where I want to end up. I’m navigationally challenged in the real world at the best of times, clearly this deficiency has spilled into the Blog.
I also know that I adore detail, it’s a strength, it’s a weakness… sometimes when I used to draw and paint I’d be guilty of focusing on one tiny part of the artwork, trying to get every detail finished down to the last tiny dot, meanwhile in my distraction I’d have completely forgotten that the rest of the painting or drawing was in a semi unfinished state or worse, not even sketched yet.
I need your advice.. am I over complicating things? or is expanding into long lists of sub-topics actually better because it helps you navigate the Blog and find bits that interest you? Should I expand some bits (like everything Dutch) but not others? (all the other countries) At a certain moment ( read “now“) it kind of makes sense to ask what readers want, and yes clearly if only two people reply and one says “make it long” and the other says ” make it short” then I’ll have a dilemma, but Ouch let’s not go there, this is complicated enough as it is. Let’s cross one bridge at a time.
So… guru’s of style and readers of Blogs, Please: How would YOU organise my Category List?
All advice will be eagerly awaited and useful interactive ideas between comments welcomed. Fire Away !
