Anthologyoi.com to be recreated? Help wanted.
Posted on Thursday the 7th of August, 2008 at 11:33 am in BlogishThis website is relatively popular and thanks to my plugins enjoys an impressive 150 Technorati ranking, but I am pondering restructuring this website to make it more user and Google friendly. Caution rambles ahead.
Right now, this site lives up to its name and is an “Anthology of Ideas.” The major categories of this website include Wordpress, Anthropology, Physics, Literature, etc. etc. This makes it hard for users to enjoy the website when the majority of posts are outside of their interests, and it makes it impossible to use contextual ads when diverse topics are on the same page.
There are a number of solutions to this:
- Use a plugin to map categories to subdomains, so that Google sees each section of the website as separate.
- Switch to Wordpress mu and separate the website into smaller websites built around similar topics.
- Start a lot of different blogs under different domain names.
I’m leaning towards the second idea because a lot of the problem with the site is that even with the different topics separated, it is all one giant website with one design. The posting frequency and design that fit a literature blog is not the same as for a web design one. I’ve thought of using multiple domain names for each section, but it will quickly become unwieldy and the domain registration fees will hit hard the wallet hard. I’ve pretty much decided to go the different blogs with WordPress Mu route because this allows me to also use domain names for deserving blogs. (AJAXed WordPress really deserves its own domain.)
While I’d hate to give up my Technorati ranking, the domain name I’m currently using has got to go. It is already too long and adding more sub-domains to it will only make it worse. I’ve tried coming up with a good domain name, but I’m stuck at this point. I need something short and punchy that will “fit” with a bunch of different topics, but I’m stuck because all natural language options seem to be taken.
While I didn’t really ask any questions, I really could use some advice on any of the points raised. Besides, once I get these issues solved, I will be back to updating like normal.
Wow, you are facing the same questions that I have been asking myself for the past week or so when I first installed WP and began tinkering. I’m pretty much a noob, only code HTML, no php whatsoever and just started with WP, and my old site is dinky, but I’ve been trying to figure out how to integrate my own artist website with my newly added blog section that uses WP. I haven’t made it very far yet, but just looking at your 3 options for yourself taught me more than I have learned in the last week! As for advice, it seems like WP mu is the way to go, but IMHO it seems that what is nice about your current blog is that you DO have all these unrelated ideas in one place - I came here to figure out how to use AjaxedWP and you sucked me into sociology, movies, and I was eyeballing Buddhism, but I have other things to do… isn’t that what the web is supposed to do? On the other hand, having different themes can keep things more clearly separate, and geared towards more narrowly focused (minded) users… I’m not sure exactly how you have this current blog set up, but it seems like you have posts archived and listed according to large categories, which are then displayed and listed at top as separate pages or sections - Is that right? Whatever you did, please tell me, cuz I might do it myself. Well, forgive my ignorance, but can’t you just tweak each “section” (or tab, or page) in templates when you write a post, thus giving each link or “tab” its own style, color, text, etc.? Obviously, you couldn’t have radically different layouts this way, but again, IMHO that may be better, as it allows you to have a wide ranging site, with very different categories, yet with some underlying design similarity connecting it all together. I do that on my main site (perhaps unsuccessfully) with different categories of my artwork having different color schemes. But what do I know, I’m still using frames… If your main concern is SEO, isn’t there a plug-in that allows you to have each page meta-tagged as a separate site? I believe I ran across that one today. Or, perhaps the categories to sub-domains is the way to go, but then will you have the full flexibility of design options that you would have with WP mu? Sorry, I was trying to help, maybe I made it worse - good luck, and thanks for the plug-in and the indirect lessons! So much to learn, so little time…
Reply to daveI believe you have another option; a variant of 0. Redesign the blog in much the same way a newspaper is designed. The Home Page would then have the first 2 paragraphs of your most recent posts from the various ’sections’ of your on-line ‘newspaper.’ The sections would be your various categories.
I can not program websites, but I have been looking for such a web template for years now. I’m surprised one hasn’t been written.
I’d much rather read a blog set up like the online Wall Street Journal or New York Sun, than the traditional ‘latest post first’ method currently used by blog templates. The difference would be that your ‘newspaper’ would just continue getting longer over time… There would be no need to ‘archive’ old copies, although I guess that’s also a possibility; have a weekly version!
Reply to Jimhey, I think if done properly you could help propel your topics/blogs with your traffic from your wordpress traffic? Anyway, a domain name series might be good…I have one and could consider sharing.
UpThat.com DonateThat.com ScriptThat.com … I’m not trying to spam, all these sites are down for now but I have many more along the same line. Anyway just a thought for you…
Reply to dstroyI don’t know what registrar you are using BUT.
Godaddy is by far one the best i’ve seen.
99 subdomains for free, damn quick to update.
Pay only 9bux to transfert from your current registrar, they give you 1 year registration free… no joke all my domains belongs to godaddy, some of my clients were using some else registrar, I had them all transfering to godaddy…
Don’t use another domain name..you’ll loose traffic.. you will be able to use 1.anthologyoi.com 2.anthologyoi.com and for free
check it out..
for my mu site, i’ve set a Wildcard domain onto godaddy so eveything.mydomain.com is redirected to my server dns and redirected… so i can have 10000’s of subdomains for no charge
Math
BtW keep up good work, Ajaxed Wordpress is AWESOME
I will post somefin about it and link to here
Reply to MathI am going with a few distinct non-overlapping categories and using plugins to split them into nearly separate sites with different tag-lines, css, etc.
I found your site while looking through all of the plugins to find the best ones to do this and other ideas.
You can follow the series over at my blog, or if you want to help go to http://luke.gedeon.name/testing-plugins-anybody-want-to-help.html
Reply to Luke Gedeon