Like many bloggers, your post topics vary: sometimes you post memoirs. Sometimes poems, sometimes recipes replete with fun food photography. Sometimes you post drawings or free-writes from the daily writing prompt or entries into the weekly photo challenge.
Further reading:
What’s a category?
What’s the difference between tags and categories?
Creating category pages.
As a blogger, you might struggle with how to organize these seemingly disparate interests on your site, as your posts accumulate in a lively stream of thought and creativity. Category pages to the rescue!
Reasons to organize
There are as many reasons to organize your posts as there are bloggers on the planet. Here are just a few scenarios:
You want to be able to return to certain posts again and again simply by clicking on a menu item on your blog. For instance: you’d like to collect all your entries to the weekly photo challenge on a single page.
You’ve discovered that your recipes are a big hit with your readers and draw the most traffic of all your posts. As a service, you’d like to offer your readers a way to see only your recipes without having to start another blog.
You like to write about books and you want to be able to go back and see which books you read each year.
You like to publish inspirational quotes and want a way to find them fast, for times when your muse is out on its unionized coffee break.
Category pages are your friend
Here’s some more information on working with custom menus.
In each of these scenarios, creating a category page allows you to display posts that share a category on the same page, whether they’re photo challenges, recipes, books-by-year, motivational quotes, or anything you wish.
Let’s use the photo challenge scenario and walk through how to create a category page. (The steps would be the same for each scenario.)
Note: it’s important that you’ve assigned the same category to each of the posts you wish to display. When we create the category page, WordPress will grab and display all the posts that share the category you choose. You might have to go back through your posts and ensure that the posts you wish to display share a category.
Prefer the classic dashboard? Here’s how to set up a category page:
Go to My Site(s) → WP-Admin → Appearance → Menus.
Select Categories → View all.
Check the box next to the category you’d like to add and click Add to menu, then Save menu.
To set up a category page, go to Menus and click on the plus icon. From the items on the left, click on Category, then from among your categories, click on Photo Challenges. Click on Add item:
Click on Save, and voilà, that’s all there is to it. You can now access all your photo challenge entries from your main menu:
For more information, check out the category pages support document.
What’s more, category pages keep on giving. Post a new photo challenge entry, recipe, book review or quote in the same category, and that post will appear on your category page, as if by magic, no further work needed on your part.
