6 Weeks Design Tip: Organizing Your Posts

Tags, categories, labels, buttons, lists, photos, blurbs…what is the best way to organize your posts? I’m always an advocate of keeping a clean sidebar and deleting anything that isn’t useful to your readers, but one thing I see a lot of people skipping are organized links to categories and features.

If you write 20 percent of your posts on cake decorating, make sure the cake decorating category and your best Hunger Games-themed cake are easy to locate in your sidebar!

Here are six well organized sidebars from six of my favorite bloggers…

Allison features links to four series she regularly posts about with simple, bright buttons.

Katie uses post titles with photos that link to four recent posts. Not the most recent posts on her blog though, she picks four specific posts to be featured.

Becka lists the top three categories, which helps readers know exactly what her blog is about. She also has three photo buttons that link to blog features and important posts.

Virginie added eye-catching photos with titles for her most-used labels.

 Zoetica adds the most recent post from three categories (latest art, latest photo and latest outfit) with a photo and title.

Kathleen links to three regular series, posts from her trek to Everest, and info on her business all in the same style with a little description of each.

+ Choose only a few items to feature. Posts/categories/series that get the most traffic, searching engine hits, comments and shares, or posts that you just straight up LOVE.

+ Keep a consistent style. Categories, series and favorite posts could all look the same, but each with its own color.

+ If you don’t have automatically rotating content, update your sidebar on a regular basis. I try to tweak mine every two or three months.

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