Chris Pearson is one of the premier WordPress developers. He understands WordPress as well as anyone- and he has a post on his site that everyone should read, here is an excerpt:
categories are a powerful tool that bloggers can use to exercise precise control over content in a dynamic environment.
Unfortunately, the true power of categorized content has been masked by the one size fits all implementation you see everywhere on the Web—the proverbial long, ugly list of category links now appearing on a blog near you.
As luck would have it, that awful category list also turns out to be a very poor presentational strategy for your site… But why?
Why Your Category List Isn’t Doing You Any Favors
By giving users a list of categories to browse on your site, you are creating a psychological conundrum that usually leaves them with a severe case of analysis paralysis. This is a condition where users, when presented with too many options, end up selecting nothing at all.
Being presented with more choices, even good ones, can hinder effective action. In one study, doctors couldn’t make a decision when a second promising drug showed up.
— Fast Company, November 2007
Counter-intuitive? Maybe. Human nature? Absolutely.
Whether you’re selling products, writing copy, or designing interfaces, you can benefit from playing into basic human psychology. And interestingly, with Website categories, accommodating natural human behavior also turns out to be an excellent SEO strategy
Automated SEO and Content Management with Categories
At first glance, it seems convenient that WordPress automatically creates category pages, tag pages, and just about every other type of page you can imagine1. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll find that this form of page bloat is a remarkably poor site-building practice—it’s a condition that should be avoided whenever possible.
As far as blogs are concerned, categories are the single biggest contributor to both page bloat and link dilution, two of the most abominable SEO sins. Ironically, when used properly, these same categories hold the key to efficient, automated site optimization and content management…
The difference, of course, is all in how you use them. Armed with a bit of knowledge and a few lines of code, you’ll be able to use categories to:
display content however you like, wherever you like
link directly to interior pages—not to interstitial “bloat†pages like monthly archives or category archives
provide your users with a smarter, more intuitive way to browse content that may be of interest to them… read the rest at:
What Every Blogger Needs to Know About Categories — Pearsonified.
I like to think of Categories as the table of contents to your site (in this metaphor- tags would be the index)- they are there to help a reader find what they are most interested in, and to group posts of a similar nature.
They are also a powerful tool to refresh old content in Google’s eyes- by collecting old posts with new posts Google sees the category as a new mix of keywords every time you add content to a category.
We can also use categories to present information in different places or in different ways if we want, but for the most part, they are a critical component of navigation. Read Chris’s whole post to learn more.
This post would have been a lot more interesting if all the sites using WordPress were linked-but, I believe that the list is probably right. My only question is why haven’t any of these government agencies hired The Next Wave to do their sites- since we are an SDVOB and HUBzone?
Here is a list (probably not all-inclusive) of United States government agencies or organizations using WordPress (whether privately or publicly):
* Air Force
* Army
* Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
* Coast Guard
* Defense Intelligence Agency
* Department of Energy
* Department of Homeland Security
* Department of State
* Department of Treasury
* Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)
* Marine Corps
* Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
* National Geospatial Intelligence Agency
* National Reconnaissance Agency
* National Security Agency (NSA)
* Navy
This list was revealed at WordCamp San Francisco, 2008.
U.S. Government Agencies Using WordPress « Mark on WordPress.
While the seasoned WP person can usually tell if a site is done in WP or not- some rookies can’t tell. An easy way to find out is just try adding /wp-admin after the primary URL and see if it takes you to the login panel.
As professional web developers of both the Joomla! and WordPress Content Management Systems (CMS) we come across many different surveys and comparisons of the two. Water and Stone poses the question “What is the most popular open source content management system?” and actually uses statistics to provide an unbiased report.
If you’ve ever wondered if WordPress and Joomla! truly are the best pieces of software that we could be using, then take a look at this survey. In the first few pages you’ll read “that three systems have come to dominate the present market: WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.” But don’t just take that as proof, look at some of the stats that are given throughout the 51 page paper.
Search Engine Visibility
The Next Wave’s core competency compared to other web hosting and design firms in the Dayton area is that we focus on getting our clients on the front page of Google. Sure, you can have a great looking website, but if no one can see it what’s the point? So, one of the first thing we looked for in this survey was any information on search engine ranking for WordPress and Joomla!.
Joomla! comes out on top with more than 1 million inbound searched links at the time of the survey, with WordPress right behind with 403,000. Notice phpnuke and MediaWiki with more than a million links as well, however these are “black hat” search engine optimization techniques that were implemented to create and keep inbound links permanent to skew search.
Do a search for “Content Management System”, and Joomla! comes up second in Google. A search for “Blog Software” (or a variant of that) and WordPress is right up there on top. This just shows that the websites that provide these two are strong in search engine optimization and Google loves to read from them. If you have a website powered by them, Google will love your site too (provided you continually update).
You can also see what people are searching for on Google, and the results that turn up for those searches. The top two systems? You guessed it, WordPress and Joomla! with a huge margin of difference from the third CMS on the list Drupal.
Ratings
OpenSourceCMS.com has a list of all of these and allows visitors to rate and comment on the various ones that are in use. For ratings, WordPress comes out on top with a rating of 4.4 out of 5. Joomla!’s up there too, with 4.2 out of 5.
Brand Strategy
“The open source CMS market is maturing and, with the increase in competition, the competitive landscape is changing. The historical leaders have been supplanted by new names. The data collected in this portion of the survey shows that in almost every way the mind share in today’s market is dominated by just three brands: WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.”
WordPress and Joomla! are at the top of everything in this survey. Their branding is superb and still growing, their ranks and ratings are high above the rest of the pack, and both have HUGE community groups that help to make the two CMS’s more stable, more flexible, and even better for web development than other systems. The next time someone says that Joomla! and WordPress aren’t good for web design, tell them otherwise. The facts are there, leading edge developers realize these systemsenable amazing work for clients in at minimum- half the time as building a website from scratch.
Read this, read it again if you want to. Print it out and pass it to your co-workers or show it to your boss so that he/she will let you start using WordPress or Joomla!. And if you’re interested in learning more about the systems, come to our next Websitetology seminar and we’ll give you the crash course that will set your business on top.