Archives Suck (and 3 Ways to Save Them)

Photo by pingnews

For a static page to become an Archive, it needs only to link to all the content you’ve written.

Despite the freedom of this definition, the archives attached to most blogs or websites are useless to 99% of its visitors.

If you follow the standard ‘months as categories’ model, where clicking on a month will open up all the posts produced during that month, it can only ever be useful to a small percentage of visitors (who either want to read through all your posts or who are, for whatever reason, interested in posts from a particular time-frame).

For many, a crippled format ensures only a tiny fraction of visitors ever interact with the Archives page. It doesn’t have to be that way. In this post, I want to explain three simple methods you can use to craft an archives page that will serve as a key conversion point for new visitors — and a place where loyal visitors become more loyal.

Why a good Archives page is important

A great Archives page concentrates all the value your offer into one page. If done well, it’s a resource that your visitors will really treasure. On most blogs and websites the Archives page represents a lost opportunity. I hope some of the tips in this post will help you change that.

Why Archives don’t belong in the sidebar

You’ll never be able to present enough information in your sidebar to make an Archives widget worthwhile.

If you move Archives to a separate page, you’ll be 1) decluttering, 2) creating a truly useful resource for visitors and 3) encouraging visitors to click to your Archives page when they want to know how old your blog or website is.

If you successfully showcase all the value your site has to offer, your Archives page could also become a highly bookmarkable resource.

A note: those bloggers using software without the capability to make pages can create a rudimentary equivalent by replacing the title and content of an old post and linking to the permalink.

Take control

At Skelliewag, I manually update my archives. I think efforts to avoid this are one of the reasons why unusable archive formats are still so popular. However, speaking from experience, it’s really not as much work as you’d think. Updating my archives page usually takes only a few minutes every week.

Once you build your archives page by hand, your options become much broader and more interesting.

If you have a lot of content to transfer over to a manual update format, I’d suggest that you make the task manageable by adding ten or twenty posts each day, rather that sitting down to do them all at once.

Here are three simple and effective ways to create an Archives page your visitors will love:

1. List article titles under each month

The method I use at the Skelliewag archives page is to use months as sub-headings and list the post titles for the month beneath each heading. This method allows visitors to scan headlines, looking for keywords that interest them.

WordPress users can use a plug-in (SRG Clean Archives) to automatically create an equivalent effect. I’ve chosen to recreate the same style of Archives manually because I want complete control of the page’s formatting. For those of you who want better archives without spending much time on them (and who aren’t control freaks), this plug-in could be an option for you.

2. List article titles under categories

Other than to highlight a sense of progression to the blog, there’s no reason your archives need to be ordered chronologically.

If you produce a lot of news content, time sensitivity will be important. If your content is relatively timeless, though, it would probably be wiser to group your content by topic rather that time.

Instead of listing articles beneath a date sub-heading, you could list articles under a category sub-heading. A visitor would then get a really quick overview of everything you’ve written on a particular topic.

3. Group posts by recommendation

Rather than focusing on dates and categories, you could use your archives page to give new visitors a guided tour of your blog or website. You could highlight the best posts in each category or start with a list of ten favorite posts.

Though a good archives page will link to every content item on the site, this method is about drawing visitor attention to some articles ahead of others.

Tailoring your Archives to suit what you need

Though each of the above methods are a huge step above the traditional Archives format, I have no doubt that there are certain approaches which work well for some sites and not others.

If you’re interested in resuscitating your Archives page I’d be happy to brainstorm some solutions with you in the comments section of this post.

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I hope those of you who celebrate Christmas had a really nice day. On Christmas day itself I had lunch with my immediate family and then on Boxing Day I had another lunch with the extended family (we’re about a day ahead of the US here in Aus).

Now I’m just recovering from two days spent mainly eating! It’s times like these I wish blogging involved a little more physical activity than tapping keys and clicking the mouse…