Your advice is helpful!

Just my 2 cents and good luck with your blog.

How would this idea work for a personal lifestyle blog? I don’t really offer ‘resources’ . Any tips?

Thanks!

His site is, essentially, a library of his work not a sales site (as such, although he has gotten clients through it). His home page is mainly an expanded ‘table of contents’ for the site — also divided up partly by topical area and partly by functional area. We “advertise” his most recent columns (written for onsite release) at the top, and have a “What’s New” page (in addition to RSS, of course) to allow newcomers to see the latest thing.

The topical links lead to a topical “home page” — again with a TofC near the top, and each topical home page is again divided by topical area. Each functional link leads to a “home page” with a chronological list of content (“text objects” I call them).

Did this take a long time? I’ve been doing his site for nearly 20 years! We try to balance someone arriving for the first time (not sure what s/he might want to read) with his long-time clients (who know what area they want to be in). Don’t know if explaining my version will help, but it seems inline with your ‘buckets’ concept.

But how about links on services you offer or request for a quote link? Would they fit best in the main navigation or just put them within content and sidebar?

All in all, I agree with how content pages are the most powerful pages in a person’s blog.

Thanks Derek!

this is a GREAT article. I hadn’t realised I seem to have a similar approach anyway intuitively but you explain the psychology behind it so well.

Also perhaps I’m not completely there. I do have a kind of topical primary menu and a second generic menu up top but never really thought about it in the way you explain. Now I’m just going to check that the topical one is clear enough without being too squished or wordy.

It’s actually my second time reading this. I never say ‘I’m bookmarking this’ in a comments section as I’ve found that and ‘great post’ are spam alert phrases, even though I hate not being able to say that if I genuinely mean it, but in this case I did just that & here I am reading it a second time and getting lots of value from it.

I actually put it in a ‘Come back to’ type of email folder which I finally came back to.

I also heard your podcast with Ramit which was really awesome. Keep up the great work Derek,

take care & best wishes,
Alan

You’re right about the category deal, almost everyone just places their different categories on the navbar or side navigation.