Rule of Thumb: Three or More for Categories
Realizing I probably had too many categories for my posts, well over a hundred, I decided it was time to trim the number down a bit. But what would be the criteria? Certainly dropping-off the single post references made sense. How does one then quantify what constitutes enough for a category? I’ve landed on the number three.
Categories or tags are connect-the-dot labels that group content from multiple posts together. It stands to reason that if there are three or more related posts, a category could tie them together.
As I stripped away useless categories, I discovered redundant/like categories that I combined. There was also a couple categories such as "writing" for which I knew I had many posts but only one was tagged.
As I move forward with posts, I will for the most part categorize retrospectively after I have three or more like posts. It’s really a simple idea but one that helps solidify the concept in my mind.
Comments (5)
That’s not a bad rule of thumb. I don’t even want to think how many categories I have on Port 16.
Over at Two Guys Tech we’re running Drupal, and you have to create the categories, and sub category items before you can use them, so it really forces you to think about what you’re doing.
I didn’t mention in the post but in WordPress, if you go to the “Categories” section under “Manage” it’s easy to see what categories are small in number and can be deleted. It makes managing that information nice.
When Scott and I were running TechFires.com, which I’m still hoping to maintain, we did a decent job of setting forth a few main categories and sticking to it. The site was very focused so that was easy.
Yay, Phil! You’re back! And with good info as usual. Nothing like hunkering down and doing a little blog housework. My categories are the pits. I’ve tried to clean them up before, but end up making what seems like a bigger mess.
Thanks Kelly, Yeah I’ve got new steam of sorts. New ideas and thoughts to take thoughtsparks into a new season. May even rework the theme at some point down the line. I always want to be tossing out some good useful thoughts mingled with the random nature of my posts. Thanks for stopping by.
[...] but sometimes it’s hard to tie them all in together. This is one place I should implement “Phil’s 3 or more for categories” rule. I do tend to go a little crazy with [...]