OR On blog content arrangement Part 4

Once readers have been drawn to your blog, they may want more. At this point, you would need some kind of underlying idea to classify your posts. The more critical thinking you put in the classification aspect, the better your blog will be. The underlying principle has to come before you make use of the great features that will enable you to group blogs such as categories or custom menus.

Do you want to group topics based on subject matter? A travel blog, for example, can have classifications such as sea-side places, the mountains or the tropics, a book review blog can be classified based on genre or authors or ethnic interest. But there can be more innovative categories too. Why not have categories such as fun reads, crazy posts, sudden thoughts and so on?

Classification based on popularity

WordPress has made it quite easy now to display popular posts based on top likes or top hits.

Again, some thinking can help.

Is your blog the kind that has a huge following beyond the WordPress community or elicits casual interest where there are many readers who will not take the trouble to hit the like button but are reading in great numbers? Then it makes sense to arrange posts by the number of hits.

Is your blog engendering interest within the community amongst returning readers? Then it might make sense to arrange posts by numbers of  likes since readers will tend to trust the judgement of other members of the community.

It’s also possible now to determine popularity within groups. So you can display the most liked Mexican food recipe posts and the most liked Indian recipe posts in separate groups. This helps to guide readers who might be interested in one or the other.

Often, the numbers competition does not work. For example, short funny posts will always be more popular than long contemplative posts but you may want to showcase both kinds anyway based on popularity and now you can do it by selecting most liked posts from separate groups.

Above all, the blog and the content display need to  work together and express character. People remember the general impression of the blog above everything else. They also remember what they want to remember. So it helps to give readers a choice regarding what they would rather read in the layout of the blog.

But don’t forget C.S. Lewis’ warning though. “No clever arrangement of bad eggs ever made a good omelet.”

So focus on the eggs and let me go eat my omlette.

End of four parts. Previous posts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.