The other day my client asked me to create a drop down menu in her navigation bar under “blog” so that website visitors could easily find related blog posts.
Creating the drop-down menu was ‘a piece of cake’, once we:
- Created the categories, and
- Assigned them to her blog post.
How To Categorize Your Blog Posts
Think of your website as a grocery store.
- The store is your website.
- Bakery, Produce, Meats and Dairy are your categories.
By default WordPress assigns each of your blog posts as “Uncategorized.” Using the grocery store analogy, you need to decide if your blog posts should fall under the category of Bakery, Product, Meats or Dairy.
How Many Categories Should You Create?
Four to five categories is perfect for most business websites.
TIP: Category names should be obvious: think 4th grade level because you want to make it as easy as possible for visitors to find what they’re looking for.
How To Create a Category
There are two ways to create a Category in WordPress:
ONE – From “Categories”
- Log into your WordPress site
- From the dashboard choose Post —> Categories
- Fill in the following fields: Name, Slug and Description
- Click Add New Category
Each new Category you create will appear on the right hand side of the Categories page, in blue, as you see here:
TWO – Create a Category within your blog post page
- Log into your WordPress site
- From the dashboard choose Post —> New
- or if you would like to add a category to an existing post choose Post —> All Posts
- on the right hand side of your blog post page, scroll down to Categories
- click +Add New Category
- Enter you new category name into the Category field
- click the Add New Category button
Here’s an example of where the Category field is located, in the back end of a blog post page:
How To Assign Categories to Your Blog Posts
- Once your categories are added, uncheck the box opposite “Uncategorized” and
- check what ever category applies to your blog post, then
- click the Update button when finished.
You may have more than one category for each blog post.
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