Why use categories? The fact is, anything that increases site ‘stickiness’ is worth looking into. You want people to stay a little longer, and if you can give them an easy to browse list of categories, it might help.

What makes a good category? That’s why I waited until I had a few articles. For me, it helps to look at them all, and then try to group them. Often, they fall naturally into categories (WordPress articles, programming articles, etc.). Sometimes not though – which means the ‘General’ entry will still be used.

Some points about the WordPress setup:

• Empty categories aren’t entered, which means you can create them early, and fill later.
• You can have multiple categories for each category – which means that an article that straddles two or more can be put in both.
• If you enter a description, it’s the text shown when your mouse is over the category name on the main page.

One annoyance – by default, categories are displayed in the order they appear in the database (which seems to be by order of creation). To change it, I consulted the WordPress Wiki, and found this solution – look for an entry like this in index.php:


<?php bbb_list_cats(); ?>


and change it to this:


<?php bbb_list_cats('sort_column=name'); ?>


Now your categories will sort alphabetically – and your blog is just a little more organized.