Blog Navigation: Wordpress and Beyond

Where am I?

Clickity clickity click. As a blogger, you love it when people bop around your blog and see what you’ve been up to. Maybe they’re long-time readers who follow your every post. Maybe they’re new and they want to see what you’re all about. Maybe they’re looking for something specific… no matter, what, your readers need to have a quick and easy way to get around.

And as the blogger, it’s your job to give it to them.

I’m a Wordpress junkie, so most of my examples in this guide are Wordpress-based. But even if you don’t use the Wordpress CMS, you can still use the principles of effective navigation for your own platform.

1. Keep it simple. Get them focused on the content, not the struggle to find it.
2. Keep it clutter-free. They’re here to read, not get dizzy with colors and animation and blinking lights.
3. Keep it clean. You picked that blog design. You may have made it yourself or even paid for it. Let it shine.

Search Boxes in Wordpress

Even if your theme doesn’t come with a search box built in, you can use a plugin to make one as long as your theme is widget-ready.

Try a plugin called Customizable Search Widget. It gives you simple options like titling the search box, choosing the size of the input field, and picking what the button should say. No coding required, and it will meld right in using the pre-defined style settings from your theme.

About those plugins...

If you’re a Wordpress user, you can install all of the plugins I’ve mentioned here directly through the plugin installer in Wordpress 2.7 and up. The plugin sites and information are also linked through the installer.

Page Menus and Pagination in Wordpress

A lot of themes, both with and without widgets, come with a page navigation system. In Wordpress, there’s a basic widget to place for sidebar navigation.

If you want to have a little more say in how the page navigation widget shows up, try the Flexi Pages plugin. It creates a menu widget that allows you to choose what pages you do and do not want displayed, sub-pages, hierarchy, and so on. Using the pre-defined styles from your theme code, it will blend right in with your design.

For the more adventurous, try WP Page Numbers plugin to simplify navigation from page to page of your content. It requires a teeny bit of code modification, but the developer’s website has a great how-to, and the plugin has great capabilities for custom designs as well as easy navigation.

With my four-year old blog, I took archives a step further and created a whole page just for them, using a plugin called WP-Archives. It calls all your archives by month and runs a list with the date and title of each post. The screenshot above is from my Archives page.

I love that it shows the post titles and doesn’t require you to click through the full text of the posts to find the one you want for the month. This is great navigation.

A similar plugin called WP Render Blogroll Links creates a page with – you guessed it! – your blogroll, split out in whatever categories you’ve designated. It’s another fine way to save on sidebar clutter but keep your content organized and easy to find.