Use Categories to Organize Your Website and Increase Usability

Categories are one of you website’s hidden superpowers! They offer a powerful way to organize content. Think of categories as your website’s main topics. They help identify, to both the user and search engines, what your site is all about.

Benefits of Categories

There are several good reasons to use categories on your website.

Every content (or post) type on a cms website can be categorized. You can create categories for posts, pages, people, videos, FAQs, and files. When you categorize content, you can use it in multiple places on your website and display related information together.

Better Usability

Categories allow you to organize your content logically for your users. Visitors can more quickly and easily find content that is relevant to them.

Helps with SEO (search engine optimization)

Google indexes categories to create a picture of what your website is about. This improves Google’s ability to rank your site for those kinds of topics and searches.

How to Create and Use Categories

So how you actually go about creating and using categories?

1. Categorize your content.

When you create a piece of content (post, FAQ, File etc.), you will see a categories area on the editor screen at the right. It will list existing categories that you can use by checking the box next to the category name.

To create a new category, from within your post’s draft, click “Add New Category.” Or from your cms dashboard, navigate to Posts > Categories.

2. Add the categorized content to your site.

Add categories of information (listings) to your site by clicking “Add Post Element.” Then choose the kind of content you would like to list (e.g., FAQ) and select the relevant category. You can create a brand new listing page or to add listings to pages that already exist.

For further details and tutorials, visit our online help centre.

Tips

Use simple, clear and descriptive category names (Don’t use something like “Other”)
Use categories that will cover a large number of posts, not just one or two. Categories are meant to encompass a group.
Don’t create too many categories. Between five and ten is a rule of thumb but this can vary depending on your site’s size and purpose.
Be consistent. For example, use singular or plural but not both for category names.
Assign a post to more than one category. For example, this post is categorized as both “Carleton CMS blog” and “Writing for the Web Tips.” This lets us display it in a couple of different places.

Examples from Around Carleton

Below are some examples of Carleton websites making good use of categories.

Pages
Categorize pages on knowledge-based sites to automatically display an index on your homepage. This is great for documentation-focused sites. Have a look at the Articles section on the homepage of our online help centre.

Files
Categories can be used with the file post type to organize and display documents on your site. The Graduate Students site uses this technique to organize their forms and policies.

People
Use categories to organize your people profiles. Sprott has a huge directory that they divide into staff and faculty. Engineering and Design uses people categories to pull research chairs onto a specific page.

Posts
You can categorize posts and pull relevant news onto a specific page. ITS does this on their security page in order to keep users up to date on new security items.

FAQs
HR uses categories on their internal site to divide and organize their many FAQs.

Categories are a way to broadly group your site’s content. They make it super easy for both users and search engines to find content on your site – try them out!

Interested in learning more cool web things?

Join us at one or our workshops. Next up is Writing for the Web on February 4th.

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