Archives Suck (and 3 Ways to Save Them)

Dec 27, 2007

Archives Suck (and 3 Ways to Save Them)
by Skellie

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.

* * *

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…

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33 Comments, Comment or Ping

Mike Goad

I’m not sure how I came across it, but I moved my archives to a separate page several weeks ago and incorporated “SRG Clean Archives.” It was all a part of an effort to reduce some of the clutter on my blog page. I like the way that it works and I’ve used it a couple of times in the past week to find old posts to reference.

Dec 27th, 2007
Mrs. Micah

Perhaps I should start that on one of the days where I’m just sitting around asking “What should I do to my blog?”

I did have someone from Amsterdam go through my entire blog from day 1 to the present day. That was a couple week ago and it was crazy (I used statcounter to follow their site path). But most people don’t do that…

Dec 27th, 2007
Mary Jaksch

This is a timely post, Skellie. My blog is still pretty young. For a while it worked fine just having a list of recent posts in a sidebar. But now there are too many … good feeling, that

So, now is exactly the right time to build an archive. At present, my posts are only in two categories which is much too wide. I’ll have to really look at all my posts to invent more subheadings.

I’m just recovering from 2 days of hard out overeating…Add to that no writing and no exercise and I find myself on the edge of grumpy - even though Xmas was great.

This is my first Xmas as a blogger. My visitor numbers are way down Maybe that’s normal for the festive season?

Have a great New!

Dec 27th, 2007
Mary Jaksch

I meant to say: Have a great New Year!

Dec 27th, 2007
Mrs. Micah

Yes, Mary, it’s pretty normal to see a big drop. Mine dropped to about 1/2-2/3 normal (which I found surprisingly high, but I guess I have good fans). I figure that people will probably be back by Monday but I have some friends who are taking the whole week off and won’t be bothering to do all their blog reading.

Dec 27th, 2007
Karen Zara

On Abaminds I don’t display archives. Older posts can only be found via Categories links.

Are archive pages essential? Wouldn’t category pages be enough? What do you think?

Curiously, I had never paid attention to that link to your archives before reading this post…

Dec 27th, 2007
Warren

To me it doesn’t seem worth it for the work involved to update archives manually. Having a ‘categories’ and ‘archives’ section in the side bar seem nearly as effective and much less cluttered to me.

I guess it depends how much content you have and what you think is important. I like the idea of a recommendation page or something showing the best reading offered though.

Dec 27th, 2007
skellie

@ Mike: Glad you’ve had good experiences with it. I actually first started doing a manual archive because I couldn’t get it to work for me. Then I got it to work, but I liked the manual archives better ;).

@ Mrs. Micah: It’s always pretty flattering when a reader does that (go through everything). Still, I think they’re a rare breed :).

@ Mary: I think this whole Xmas/New Years period is quiet for everyone. Like the non-ratings period on TV ;-). I wouldn’t worry about it. Have a great New Year to you too :).

@ Karen: They’re essential for SEO and from a usability perspective, because they essentially function as a sitemap of your site. Categories don’t perform the same function because you’re scrolling through posts rather than getting an overview of titles. A lot of people won’t take the time to slog through dozens of posts, so it’s a lost opportunity if you’re only offering categories.

@ Warren: I think having a categories section in the sidebar is essential but putting archives there is clutter because it can’t be effective. I get a sense that you don’t see archives as being that important… in my response to Karen above I’ve explained why I think they are (though you’re welcome to disagree).

Dec 27th, 2007
Goal Setting College

Skellie, another excellent tip. I totally agree with you adding that monthly archives on the sidebar is very “clutterish”. When I moved on to a new redesign, those were the first items I removed. I’m exploring the possibility of adding categories links in my sub navigation bar as well.

I’ve used SRG Clean Archives almost a year now and I must agree it’s quite a must-have. Since the first installation and an update (after I upgraded to a higher Wordpress version), I’ve never really touched the code and it’s still beautifully managed. So, Warren, it’s not really a lot of work …

Btw, Skellie, can I suggest you put your archives page slightly up higher together with your “home”, “about”, “contact” menu bar? As a visitor, that’s one of the first places I would go to if I want to navigate around a site. And with your wonderfully written content, in my opinion, that’s one of the best ways to do justice to them

Cheers,
Ellesse

Dec 27th, 2007
Anthony Lawrence

I’ve been posting regularly since 1997, so I have a LOT of archives.

I do a number of the things Skellie has suggested. First, every post is tagged with one or more categories, and often I add categories as I increment enough posts to justify it. When any page is viewed, the sidebar will contain random selections from archives in the same categories. That’s been very effective in raising my average pageviews per visitor, by the way.

That’s all code driven, but for some articles I manually indicate the strongly related archives and display those in the sidebar. It’s “if you are reading this, you probably don’t want to miss this other page” kind of thing.

Of course I also have archives by year and month, and I also have a “most popular” section (again, all code driven, no maintenance required). The Site Map page breaks things down by more coarse categories also.

Then I have my “Favorites” section, which lists posts I like (often because of reader comments). That does require a small amount of manual attention, of course.

Finally, I have a “random page” link, which just randomly selects some archive page and displays it. I put that in for my own use, but the logs show that other people use it too..

Dec 27th, 2007
David LaFerney

Skellie, You are certainly correct that archives are important for SEO, but you don’t really have to have an “Archives Page” for SEO. Whether you do or not you should have an XML sitemap just for the spiders. There are several WordPress plugins that will automatically update your sitemap and ping the search engines whenever you create a new post. I use Google Sitemaps By Arne Brachhold.

If a blogger has any hope to ever make money from their blog they should keep in mind that traffic via search engine directly to your archived articles converts to add clicks much better than subscriber traffic.

Dec 28th, 2007
Patty Hankins

Thanks for the great tips. I just started blogging a couple of weeks ago - so am still figuring out how to best set it up. The tip about archives on a separate page is great - now I just have to figure out how to set it up.

Dec 28th, 2007
Ruchir

Wow, I never thought about that Skellie. I’ll be changing my archives soon. By the way, will it be better if I provide both month based and category based archives? Or should I just stick to one?

Dec 28th, 2007
George Beinhorn

Skellie, you’ve struck at the one thing that prevents blogging software from being usable to create a decent Web site for presenting durable material (as opposed to ephemera and whimsy). I love WordPress for the ease with which I can create articles, but “static pages” just don’t allow the formatting flexibility to create a good archive page. So, like you, I’ve resorted to good old Dreamweaver. And I love it. Say, couldn’t a small software shop seize this niche and make a fortune - with a WordPress-like app that could do it all? Those interested can see my solution at http://www.fitnessintuition.com.

Dec 28th, 2007
Ravi

I’m just wondering why you’re still manually updating your archives, Skellie, when you pointed out a plugin that does a very similar job. Any differences in presentation could probably be easily modified in the code, I imagine.

I also switched my archives a while back to a similar setup. On my archives page, I now highlight all past posts (reverse chronological), most popular posts, recent comments, with monthly and weekly links tucked in there too (both will probably be making way for a tag cloud soon enough).

I first saw this type of archives page (with all posts listed on one page, so nothing is more than 2 clicks away from the homepage) at SEOBlackHat.com (don’t worry, just happened to visit the site once) and thought it was ingenious. MUCH more useful to a reader than anything else.

Thanks, and hope you’re enjoying the holidays, Skellie!

Dec 28th, 2007
Zeno

Hey Skellie,

As always your posts are very helpful! I just moved the archives to a separate page

Thanks and have a Happy New Year!

Dec 28th, 2007
skellie

@ Goal Setting College: That’s a good idea… let me think about it :-).

@ Anthony: I really like the way you’ve used your knowledge of coding to make your blog better. There are a lot of things I’d like to do to enhance Skelliewag but I just don’t have the technical know-how. I’m jealous ;).

@ David: Good idea about the XML sitemap… I’m pretty sure I don’t have one!

@ Patty: Congrats on the decision to start blogging :).

@ Ruchir: If you can provide both in an easy to use way, I’d do that. Good luck with it :-).

@ George: That could be a million dollar idea you’ve got there… Any web developers reading? :).

@ Ravi: The way I do my archives manually is as similar to the plug-in as possible, but I find that when titles are too long they go on to a second line and make it look messy (whereas I can shorten titles that are too long). If I could work out how to code that into the plug-in I would but I don’t have the knowledge.

@ Zeno: Good move — and a Happy New Year to you too :).

Dec 28th, 2007
Mike Macgirvin

Like Anthony, I’ve been writing online for a really long time. My current archives date to 2001, but I’ve been providing online updates to family and friends since the early ’80s; long before they called it blogging. Recently added the ability to put in ‘biographical entries’ which let you put in an entry from any point in your life - say when you were ten years old.

But this tends to exaggerate what you’re saying about the archives taking up a lot of sidebar space and not providing a lot of value. I’ve now got archives dating to 1956.

The random article function that Anthony mentioned is one of my most heavily used pages (besides the stage name generator). I highly recommend having one i- f you’ve got more than a year of content. As has been noted, very few people will browse the entire collection. But if you make it easy for them to flash through the past, many will spend hours flipping through random articles.

Dec 28th, 2007
David at free Christian Resources

Hi Skellie,

I just did this on my blog a couple of weeks ago. I still want to do some work to make the archives page “prettier” but it works so much better as a stand-alone page.

I think archive pages are particularly useful for regular readers as an extra way to help them find an old article. They may not be used much - but can help save time. I guess it is the fact they are not used much which makes it best not to keep it in the sidebar - it adds no real value

Cheers,

David

Dec 29th, 2007
Oddsocks

Maybe you could hook your laptop up to a generator powered by an exercise bike skellie?

Dec 29th, 2007
Sean Hodge

I haven’t been blogging long enough to worry about archives. But its food for thought as I grow. You mentioning the SEO benefits makes me really want to put it together once I have a few more posts. Thanks alot.

Dec 29th, 2007
Anthony Lawrence

@Skellie

Don’t be jealous, do something about it.

Anybody - ANYBODY - can learn the basics of programming. Php, Perl, Javascript: these are very easy languages and there is so much available on the web to help you learn.

Why shouldn’t you be Master of your site? You should be..

As it happens, I just did a post this morning titled “But I’m not a programmer!”

If you are smart enough to write a coherent paragraph (and I think we can all agree that you are), you are smart enough to learn basic programming skills.

Dec 29th, 2007
Anthony Lawrence

Oh, and Skellie: you gotta, gotta gotta have a Google Sitemap..

You just gotta!

As usual, I wrote my own code for that, and offered it on my site to anyone who needs or wants it..

Dec 29th, 2007
Fashion By Jenni

On the last day of each month I write an overview of the month and give a description of each article. I have one page where I link to all my overviews, so I don’t clutter the page. If you are intrested to see how I organize the overviews you can check it out here:http://fashionbyjenni.wordpress.com/2007/12/31/an-overview-of-decembers-posts/

Jan 3rd, 2008
Mark McGuinness

Thanks Skellie, I combined this with your tip about Flickr images to not only declutter my sidebar a bit, but also to create an archive that’s much more attractive and useful (for me as well as my readers).

Jan 24th, 2008
Mark McGuinness

D’oh! Helps if I include the link: http://www.wishfulthinking.co.uk/blog/the-wishful-thinking-archive/

Jan 24th, 2008
BillinDetroit

Thanks, Skellie. Frankly, I think I could spend ALL of my time learning about blogging and skip the part about actually doing it!

But I don’t see how that would help me meet my financial goals.

I followed a couple links ‘out’ (the term ‘link sniping’, in particular, intrigued me) and found some excellent material out there. So I also want to thank you for the research you have done.

Mar 26th, 2008