I’ve been trying to figure out this website’s site structure. I write about random things and make random pictures that I post on social media. But what the hell is going on? I figured out what to do. Almost anyways. As usual, I need this blog to get my thoughts down. So let’s dig in.
It seems easy, but it is a pain in my butt. For someone writing articles on how to start a website, I sure don’t know what I’m doing, lol.
Site structure
As of right now, the menu is set up like this. The Cool Things category is all over the damn place. That’s where my problem is. I enjoy covering the history and origins of traditions and how things work. They are all piled in there. So I need to rework some things.
| Home | The Cool Stuff | Trivia | Blog | About Me |
| >Astronomy | >Did you know? | |||
| >Awesome Places | >Astronomy | |||
| >Cool Things | ||||
| >Famous Quotes | ||||
| >Gaming | ||||
| >Strange Things |
New Layout
So I opted for the layout below. I could put history and origins of traditions posts in the History tab and start making individual posts for my did you know pictures I make for social media. They usually have a brief description of a fact. It would be cool to give them their pages and explain the point in more detail.
I could also use the “did you know” category for explaining how things work. The Strange things category can get merged into this as well. So basically everything in the strange things category will have a broken link. Booo.
| Home | The Cool Stuff | Trivia | Blog |
| >Astronomy | >Did you know? | >About Me | |
| >Cool Things | >Astronomy | ||
| >Did You Know | |||
| >Famous Quotes | |||
| >Gaming | |||
| >History | |||
| >Places to visit |
Moving the About Me page under the Blog will help too. I feel weird having that page on top of the menu. I’ve been told it’s good to have it there. Under blog is close enough, lol.
Google is going to be mad
Rearranging the menu like this sounds simple, but it has significant implications. It will break links by moving posts into different categories. I will have redirects to fix this, but search engines hate redirects. So it will take months to correct it in the search engines.
This is the reason I’m putting so much thought into site structure now, while the site is new. If I change my mind a year from now, when I have hundreds of posts, will be detrimental to the search engine placement of Wisedocks. At the moment it will only affect a couple posts. So let’s get it done.
I could put the posts that will end up with broken links into multiple categories to solve the problem. But then it will create duplicate content when the website is crawled. This is a major problem. Google for instance will avoid duplicate links to the same article. It looks spammy to them. So it’s best not to do it.
Back to square one
This change is going to cause google to hate me. Three months of work down the drain to get indexed. But it will pay off in the long term.
