One of the final tasks that needed to be completed with the ProBlogger redesign was to get our Archives Page up and running.
I’m pleased to say that today it’s up and running and presents our archives both by Date and Category – highlighting a few key articles from each category with a short description.
We also included a search function in it to help readers find posts on topics that they can’t find otherwise.
The thinking behind the page is that it effectively becomes another Sneeze Page that drives people deeper within the blog.
I’m sure we’ll continue to evolve it over time – but any feedback you have in the mean time will be greatly appreciated.
Congrats!
I’m going to go check that out now…
I like the way the ‘by date’ section is laid out, but not what happens when you click on a link. I was expecting to get a list of post titles generated within the archives page that I could scroll through, not for a full page of excerpts to be generated.
Ditto with the categories archives – displaying just the titles would be great for fast browsing.
I use the ELA plugin to generate my archives page. It’s a bit slow to generate the first page view, but I think it’s effective
I’d love to hear more about your experience creating these archives, what plugins you used if any, and discussion on WordPress archive tools in general.
Everton – yeah, I’ve never been satisified with date archives or category pages on any blog I’ve ever had. We were just talking about it last night – will keep tweaking.
Beth – the categories are static, although could be done dynamically by using categories to define which posts you want to display as “featured” in a specific category and running a loop to cycle through the categories.
The dates are displayed by using a plugin called Smart Archives.
I like this tweak. It works really well for a site with so many articles on them. It’s a non-issue for sites that don’t have that many posts, of course.
Hm, now I am considering making my side bar into a standard side bar / site map hybrid… when I have more materials to organize, that is.
I still do not understand why date archive is important. I eliminated it from my blogs, but I am a Newbie, probably am missing something important.
How do people use the date archive, in making blog reading more effective?
Do you think I should bring it back?
Nice Use for your archives
One thing though: is it maintained by hand or a plug-in?
Thanks
A decent Archives page has always been my weak point in blog design. It’s pretty hard to make something useful both for readers and search engines.
Asako » I think the only use for time based archive is internal linking to make the search engines job easier indexing your site. Apart from this, I cannot think of any reason to use them, unless of course your blog has a time sensitive nature (news, covering some events, etc)
Darren » how are key posts picked in your key categories? Is it based on post views, number of comments, anything automatic, or did you hand pick them?
Thank you, Ozh!
Bug in the archive page.
Two categories -31 days to..and advertising-shows same content. heading is ok but the posts and description are both exactly same
Darren – I liked the date-based archive you have. Just wondering if this was achieved with a plugin or was it manually crafted? Care to share the secret?