The flexibility of blogs lies in many options for organising blog posts. One problem is you don’t necessarily know whilst writing a post how you might use it in the future.
Post URLs
Each post has a unique url. You can link to it from other posts and pages on your own or other sites. This is an under-appreciated aspect of blogs.
I’ve seen websites that attempt to marshal large amounts of information on their web pages. So, it is almost impossible to search for anything on the site. If the site has a search box, it will take you to the page, not to the item you seek. You will need to scroll down through perhaps dozens of items to find your topic.
It can also be difficult to delete information. Deleting a page can affect the structure of a website, as other pages might be accessed through it and so become unavailable. Blog posts are independent of the rest of their site and so they can be deleted. The only problem may be if there are links to those posts from other posts, pages or sites. With ping-backs, you will have a record of them in your comments section. If a post has a lot of back-links you might wish to consider alternatives to deleting it, for example amending the content.
Posting regularly means you will have a lot of posts and so need to organise them. How you do this may become clearer as you develop your site but categories and tags are good ways you can make some initial decisions that will help you in the future.
Today I’ll explain the difference between categories and tags and then in the next three posts tell you more about them. Remember these are the basics. There are more advanced approaches to make your posts more accessible, eg Cornerstone pages.
Categories
Categories help you classify posts. They are a basic way of indicating to your readers what the post is about and which posts are closely related to it. If, for example, you want your readers to follow a sequence, you can put its posts in the same category. Posts can be in more than one category and categories can have subcategories.
Tags
Tags help you search for content. You might want to find everything in a certain blog about a particular topic, and assuming the blog authors have identified the same topic they will have assigned tags to relevant posts. Most posts will have more tags than categories but it does depend on the author.
The extent to which and the way you use these will depend upon the blog’s author and it may take time to get used to a particular author’s idiosyncrasies. You may wonder: who cares? The most important person is the author who may need to organise posts in the future and the categories and tags they assigned when they wrote the post may help them organise their posts into more readable formats. So, it is worth making the effort to be as consistent as possible.