Wriging

To answer my own question. I'm currently using only the Search and the typical Categories list. I think it's a terrible arrangement (yet, it's the standard!). My plan is to make a whole page dedicated to the Archives:

The frontpage will still show the featured (latest) article plus a few of the most recent ones. But then I'd like to implement a special Archives page that uses some different ways to show users older posts. I can envision something like a grid-organized page with boxes showing post excerpts. One box could contain "Most popular entries" or "Most commented on" — other's could simply be Category boxes showing random 5 posts from that category.

Another option I'd like to implement, but don't really know how yet, would be to pull up random 5 images from older posts who each link to their respected entry. These could be shown in another box maybe...

Anyway, that's what I'm hoping I'll have time to do, at least to some extent.

Good topic Hrafn, this is something I've been thinking about as well.

I recently added a Random Post generator to my homepage sidebar, and I also utilise the Related Entries plugin on single pages. However, both are pretty much ignored at the moment. I do use Alex King's Popularity Contest plugin and that one does get more clicks. Unfortunately, it also lists pages which is a bit annoying for me, but it does quite well placed on the homepage above the fold. I'm in the process of putting together a "Best of..." or "Featured Articles" page where visitors can read some of my better posts and hopefully will prove to be more widely read than the standard Archives page. Currently the links are hard-coded into the footer, but they're lost down at the bottom and I'm too lazy to update them all the time.

Great note, hthth. It's one I'm definitely bookmarking as I feel my archives section could use a revamping. Actually, I'm thinking of an entire redesign--we'll see how that goes.

For the revamp, I'm really feeling the related posts plugin, a plugin I probably should've already installed in hindsight. I like the idea of Ollie's Popularity Contest plugin--I'm definitely gonna give that one a go. I should also hand pick some "notable entries" as it is but at the same time I'm not sure I want to suggest too much. One thing's for sure, though, I'm not suggesting any posts right now.

I'm actually having the same debate with myself.

I currently offer a tags page, a search page and an archive page listing every post I've ever made in reverse chronological order (newest first).

That is, in my opinion, far too much. It's too confusing for me, let alone users and it's taking up far too much navigation space.

So I'm considering throwing all three in together on one page. When the page loads you see every post but on the side user will be able to add keywords, and specify tags that they want the results to show.

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Other than that, I always have a 3 latest and 3 greatest (most reads ever) at the bottom of every page, and on the front page I have a little sidebar showing current hot entries and latest comments.

It will get more complicated when I add the forums back in, but for now I just need to let people find content in a sensible fashion.

The best advice I can give is to have a "Top Posts" page because this means you can direct people to what you think is your best content - irrespective of it's popularity.

Although I do like the "random posts" idea quite a lot, I may have to use that now that I've had to remove my text links...

I am in the midst of redoing my layout and features as well, I'm at about 80% so most things are working.

What I'm doing is the top-posts... but two ways. In a single article view you see the top posts. If they're viewing a category (list of articles in said category,) they get the top posts specific to that category.

I still have to put a "related" posts area on the single post page, but it's almost ready.

@Ollie
Thanks for sharing the links and info, I'm looking through them now and I think I can make use of all of them. Good to hear how they're working from someone I know. Regarding hand selected topics, I have a problem as well (meaning that I often forget to update the list).

@Estarla
Actually, I'm thinking of an entire redesign--we'll see how that goes.

Not that I want to discourage you from evolving -- I just want to say that I love your current design. Color scheme and layout, but especially the e*starLA splash-image in the header :)

@Oli
So I'm considering throwing all three in together on one page. When the page loads you see every post but on the side user will be able to add keywords, and specify tags that they want the results to show.

That sounds like a seriously awesome plan, and I think you'd be right in combining the three pages. I Iook forward to checking it out when you launch it.

@seopher
Yeah. It's a good point that hand-chosen entries give readers easy access to what you/the author considers cream of the crop. Thereby giving newcomers a quick way to see what the blog can be.

My concern regarding this (I'm not saying this applies to you, this is just my problem) is that I tend to put entries I've spent much time and effort to write as a "Featured article" — thus, if a newcomer were to browse my featured articles he might not get the a true image of what my blog is really like. (i.e. I'd never put an entry there that contains a video someone else made and only a few paragraphs written by me. Even though some of my entries might be like that.) So a featured list, in my case, has to be balanced against some other list — like "Most Viewed Entries".

@Ozone
That's a good idea, and definitely better than simply showing the flat archives by date.

Hthth, I just have that particular design in mind. Because I designed my blog in a way that the latests post isn't on the front index. It's on top as a separate portion from the normal chronology, but only as a big link and an excerpt.

Besides that, in the same separate portion are my Asides, my Twitter posts and post importantly 3 random posts and its excerpts from the archives. It rotates every time you load the page.

After that separate portion are the normal chronological posts and the sidebar. The sidebar has Feed Subscription, Random Gallery images, Most read posts, most recent comments, most recent mybloglog readers, top commentors and then external links.

The idea was that regular returning readers need not necessarily have to go to the front index to read my latest post, they would usually keep track of it via my feeds. So I only put it as a link. The rotating random archived posts gives readers a chance to see past posts. Asides and Twitter speak for themselves because they are just one off thoughts of the moment or announcements.

The sidebar goes in that order because I thought it would have been important for the new readers to get an idea of my blog as they come in and perhaps participate in comments as well.

Eventually it was designed so that one off readers might be interested enough to come back again and again liking what they read from the archives and the most read posts and comments.

I can't say for sure whether this has really worked because exposure of my blog is a little low and people are often unresponsive. I do plan to have a questionnaire out early next year before my annual redesign though, but so far, I think for exposing old archives, this is as optimum as I can come up with.

I think the best archives page I have ever seen had to have been in Bryan Veloso's Aries Project. It's so sad that that site has died off. But it was easy to browse and very thorough. I am going to set up my own blog soon and I am planning to design it from cover to cover and yes, archives too.

@hthth: Thanks so much for the compliment. :)

I admit I tend to get a little hasty and think of entirely scrapping things when tweaking things here and there would suffice. Then again, scrapping things and starting from scratch is always an option I consider if not just to be all-out thorough. But yeah--this note definitely gave me things to think about in terms of my archives. It's its own tab right now and I think that's fine. I will check out the plugins mentioned here and have an idea where I could insert their outputs. :D

Ooh I've been pondering this same thing. I have an archive of 400 food reviews and I would love to feature some of the older reviews. But here are my thoughts.

There are a few options. That top box with all the meta information could be used to house a random - or featured - post with an exerpt.

Also I like the related entries. But, I also like regular monthly archives and categories. I have used them to navigate people's sites and I am sure others do and will.

Also the layout instead of showing the last n entries - for example, could show the last entry from each category.

I think magazine style layouts lend towards showing more content, but it's harder to incorporate ads.

I don't think I can contribute much here. Don't have my own design, haven't given it much thought, never managed a lot of "sense of focus". One wonders how and why I blog in the first place :-D

About your problem, though, a few random thoughts strike me.

Search is and will remain essential. Not much needs to be said, I think. Archives are there not only for new visitors, but also for readers who vaguely remember something you may or may not have written about. I think there's a clear distinction between the two user groups.

If you want the archives to be more prominent, don't put them away on another page. Sure, there can be an additional page, doing its thing in the woodworks, but don't just put a link there on the home. I for one almost never click those. All the ideas posted here about plugins and random goodness seem very interesting in this view. The Yanko example is great, although I'd have to say that just showing images makes me think these are on Flickr, or adverts even. I would have to know these refer to previous posts to use them.

Third thought: it would be cool if you could pull data from an external site (say Technorati - although I realize your subject matter wouldn't relate to that much) and have the current "popular searches" on that site look for items in your archives that could have anything to do with those.

I know, this is confusing and perhaps impossible to implement, but imagine "Nokia" being a popular search on the web (because there's some new phone out, whatever), then, in my imagination, that "thing" I'm proposing would suggest articles you wrote about mobile technology or Finnish design. Just making things up here of course.

Okay, so I did have a lot to say after all. Nobody will read all this, but perhaps it sets off some ideas with you. Hope you work that out and come up with some killer archive page. Be sure to mention you got it here then ;-)

I just put together a new archives page at my blog and thought I'd add it to this discussion. Because my design has no sidebar, I went with a separate page for the archives (though I think Nils has a point about people not looking for such a page). Where before I only had the enormous list of posts and the categories section, I added the tag cloud (very easy to do in WP2.3+) and a recommended section.

On each entry, I also have links to related posts. I've switched from the Related Posts plugin that Ollie mentioned to the Similar Posts plugin, which seems to do a better job of both finding similarity and making sure each post has related entries.

Wow, Dave, you read all that? Thanks.

Looks good. You know, I read your blog (or at least, I try to keep up) but I've never commented or perused old entries yet. I should try that now.

I use the Clean archives and it is on another page. I never put my archives out there before I started using it because I didn't want them on the front page they took up too much room so I can't compare the separate page to the front page, but it is surprising how many people head to the archives from the menu and it's also surprising how much time people spend flipping through them.

I think having a whole page makes it more likely they will look through them so it's a good idea.

again, i think i'm gonna be the odd man out here. I don't provide any type of archive view on my site, i considered it a wasted space really considering the low number of posts i had. also my design is single column, which only leaves me with the option of a superfooter, which ain't my cup of tea. have no other side pages like contact or about so creating a navigation link was also out of the question. so what do i do for archive? NOTHING. i have pagination going so if someone wants to look at older posts, they can just go back a couple pages. Once i get more going, maybe i'll consider doing something about that, but until then, its not a big deal.

A combination of tag clouds and standard archives works well for me. If readers really like your blog then they will do what they can to read it.

Courtney Tuttle and several other blogs I like, show related posts from the past for each single post. It's kind of like "related products" on a shopping site. I find this helpful and unobtrusive—definitely worth a try.