My pages are too full, my preferred reader says: She constantly gets something to click on another article. She understands why. I wanted to entice her to read on. Like a real news portal. But my content was not broad enough. I only want to talk about a few core topics. So, kill your darlings — throw away, what distracts — too much is just too much.
If she wants to read on, one list of options would be enough. That’s it. And if she is interested in a core topic, she wants to get all posts about it at a click. Full stop. In other words, she wants to get a lean page with at least discreet hints to other pages.
Solution
- In the
sidebarwidget, delete the Recent Post List, the tag cloud, and the categories cloud.e - Delete the plugin
Recent Posts Widget Extended. - Go to Appearance/Menu and
- Select your footer menu and delete it.
- Organize your main menu so that your main categories appear on the top level.
- Add a Custom Link with a list symbol + text below each category, which you let point to
https://fodina.de/category/your-top-category-x. - Add an icon for ‘overview’ at the end of your main menu on the top level.
- Add a Custom Link with a list icon under this quasi-category, which you let point to
https://fodina.de/myplp. - Also add a Custom Link with a sitemap symbol under this quasi-category, which you let point to
https://fodina.de/sitemap.
Background
You might ask yourself why I throw so much away, although I put so much effort into adding all this during the last weeks. Couldn’t I have thought about that before? I could have! But I don’t work that way. I prefer to take a practical look at how it works and clean up afterward. Gladly also after helpful hints. The most important phase in writing is also the one in website design, namely, the Kill Your Darlings phase:
- Why do we need a footer menu that only leads back to the main categories? To make scrolling easier for our reader? The main menu is always visible at the top of bootScore anyway. So away with the footer menu!
- And why do we need the recent post list in our sidebar? Our overview page presents our posts in descending order anyway. The latest posts are the first to be mentioned there. And our reader wanted to have fewer ‘see-here-again’ incentives. So away with the Recent Post list!
- If we don’t have a Recent Post list, we don’t need a plugin to beautify it. So also away with that!
- Why do we need a tag cloud in the sidebar on each page? Our reader just wants to have a search page. With everything that is needed. A tag cloud would make sense on that page. But not everywhere. So away with the general tag cloud.
- And why do we need a category cloud? We can structure our menu according to it. So away with the category cloud!
Now we just have to tell our reader that there is — as requested — the one and only search page. To do so, we add an overview category in the menu, under which we link to our search page myplp.((myplp stands for My Post List Page and calls our list page home.php as a menu entry)). And for the sake of simplicity, we can also link to our sitemap right here. That’s good for our SEO.
But we could make our reader’s life even easier. By adding a fancy ‘more’ button in the sidebar, which simply leads to our overview page, myplp. However, this would then also appear in the sidebar of the myplp page itself, which would be nonsense. So we need different sidebars for different pages. We’ll tackle that next.
And how does this …
… support our migration to bootScore? Well, when the web designer has completed her work on good illustrations, she can relax and integrate tags and clouds into her site, improve her overview page and design her own landing page. Whether the resulting fullness really benefits her own reader, whether it can become slimmer and how, whether more discreet references and specific fonts also increase the readability, all this she should nevertheless consider while implementing these features. This post supports these steps towards a personalized bootScore site.