Think of your WordPress site first as a set of file cabinets, a CMS, or Content Management System. You, and perhaps other guest authors, will be writing hundreds to thousands of posts, or articles, in the future. Your main categories are file cabinets, with sub-categories (or child categories) as the drawers in those cabinets. You can even drill down more with sub-categories of the sub-categories, much the same as file folders in the drawers.
Now, let's put your real estate website information into our drawers and cabinets. You'll likely want some major category groupings like:
- Areas of town or the county/MLS area you cover.
- Real Estate as a main category that talks about the process.
- Government and Education.
- Shopping, Entertainment and Culture.
These are just examples, and you may have more or less. I have quite a few more on my site. Now let's look at each of these example file cabinet categories and see the file drawers we might have in them:
Areas of Town or Areas Covered - How might we break this main category down? Each area by name or location is the most obvious set of file drawers. However, we might also break them out by home price ranges, MLS area codes, or something else. You may want to have file folders in these drawers for things to do in each area, subdivisions in each, schools in each, or other break-outs.
Real Estate Main Category - This is where we want to talk about real estate as our job and a process. File drawer sub-categories might be:
- Transaction Process - includes documents, title insurance, surveys, appraisal, etc.
- Negotiations - posts about how people come to agreement or not on a deal, repair negotiations, etc.
- Statistics - my favorite, as I get great traffic on property sold reports and regular commentary on market trends backed up by numbers.
- Our Services - we might even break this drawer down into folders for Buyers and Sellers and what we do for each.
Government and Education - obviously, we'll be writing articles about building codes, zoning, schools, school systems and everything about local government and schools. You could break this drawer down into folders for the two, and then again for school districts, and even for government levels, as in county and city.
Shopping, Entertainment & Culture - probably best to break down into sub-category folders for each of these. Then post about everything that's going on, where to buy, and all of the arts and culture in the area.
Here's a screen shot of a pretty comprehensive category plan for a real estate blog site.
Archive Pages in WordPress - You'll find a lot of blogs out there with an "Archives" widget in one of the sidebars. Almost all will have posts filed by month they were published. This is a good time to talk about it, as categories are also archives, but by subject. WordPress also creates these time archive pages on the fly when called, and they group by month when published.
I can really find little reason to use valuable screen space for a list of months to locate posts. How many of your visitors do you believe would have a need to try and locate a post by when you wrote it? It's far more likely that they will want to look up information on title insurance, or local building codes, etc. So, if your theme comes with the monthly archive widget pre-installed and running, just go into widgets and remove it. I'll show you how to do that later in our sidebar widgets chapter.
