How do I label/categorize my posts?

Blogger uses labels - Wordpress uses categories and labels. It doesn’t matter what you call them, you need to use them to help enforce some organization in your site. The problem is that people run into problems with how to setup their labels/categories.

My previous post, “more tips for good web design“ covers site structure, but its good to remind everyone about how site structure applies to blogging. Basically here’s the concept in a nutshell - use 5 to 7 categories to cover all of the main topics of your blog. If you don’t have 5 main topics, then start with 2 or 3 and add on as you blog. If you have more than 7 topics, I would then use subcategories. Find the 7 main categories and then for each main category follow the same principal of 5 to 7 subcategories.

The concept is based on how people handle choices. Most people can only make a intelligent choices from a maximum list of 7. Anything over 7 and people will more than likely remember only the first and last option - and maybe one of the options is the middle. Some people can handle more, some less. Consider your own experiences with a menu at a restaurant. If the restaurant has a full menu, both lunch and dinner items, it can become very overwhelming to try to choose. And how many times does someone say I’ll get the chicken parmesan - and you say, “I didn’t see that on that menu!”? Plug in whatever dish, but the point is that with more than 7 choices, we start to get major blind spots in our brain. Now consider a lunch menu - condensed, usually about the same price for each choice - now you can really start to contrast and compare the menu choices and try to make the best choice for your dining pleasure.

So, we want to take advantage of this for our users. We don’t want them to have blind spots when they visit our site. So staying to true to this principle is a critical step in having a well designed web site blog.