 Hello again. In this video, we're going to be talking about post categories. Now, you may have noticed in the list of training videos for the Nebraska Libraries and the Web Project, I've listed this video prior to the video for creating posts. I had a little trouble trying to figure out what order to put them in, but I did decide to put this one prior to the creating a post because I think when it comes to post categories this is something that you may want to put a little effort into in advance before you write too much content. You can always update these settings later as your content changes, but this is something I think a little pre-planning can help you out. Now, there are actually two ways that you can assign keywords to your posts. One is categories and one is tags. I don't really encourage the use of tags, so I'm not actually going to talk about them all that much and I'm not going to create their own video. If you really like some help with that, feel free to drop me a line and we can talk about it a little more. In this case, I'm going to focus on categories and encourage you to do some pre-planning. Let me show you where those are. I'm going to hover over the posts menu and then we have here categories. I'm going to go ahead and select that. What we have here are what looks like a complicated page, but there's really only a couple of things that we need to pay attention to. One is this right-hand side here which lists the current categories available for our posts. The only one available at the moment is uncategorized. That's the default. There's no description for it. It's slug is called uncategorized. I'll talk about that in a little bit. At the moment, probably most importantly, the count four. In other words, I have four posts that are currently listed under the uncategorized category, which basically means they have no category. What you want to do here is you want to think about what categories you might use to organize the blog posts that you're going to write. I think the best way to do that is I'm going to show you two other websites that I personally run where I've done it. In each case, I've come at it from a completely different perspective. The first one I'm going to show you here, I'm going to switch over. This is the creating new post page for the Friends of the Aurora Public Library, a website that I still run for a group in Aurora, Colorado. If I look over to the right end down, and I'll scroll this up here a little bit just to make it a little easier to read, is you will see that we have categories, and I basically have four categories. One's called all about libraries and books, one's called news, one's called sales, and one's called uncategorized. Can't get rid of the uncategorized one, it's just kind of stuck there. When I write a blog post, I can then say, okay, this is a blog post that kind of goes into that all about libraries and books catalog, or this is a news post, or this is a sales post, because at least once a month, the Friends book outlet does do sales, so we post sales. I'm not saying you need to use these categories, I'm just saying for this site, that works really, really well. One that's gotten a little more complicated is my own personal website, the Traveling Librarian, and again, we'll go over to the right and scroll down a little bit, and you'll see here categories, and we have this big long list. Everything from audio to blog posts I wrote about Bali, to e-books, to Learning 2.0, to Nebraska, to WordPress, to writing. I've been doing this website for years and years, so I've created a lot of categories. You'll see here there is add a new category, so I want to stress that even if you set them up in advance, you can add new ones if a case arises. So those are just kind of two examples. The idea behind categories is that whenever you write a new post, you want to categorize it, and I'll show you why at the end. But let's go back to now our test website here, and so let's say I've done a little thinking, and the way I've decided I'm going to organize my content for my library is kind of by age group. That's one way to do it, not the only way, but let's just use that as our example. So I'm going to write children, and the slug you do not have to change, we're just going to leave it, and what it will do is basically just repeat itself. Parents list here allows you to kind of create subcategories, so parent categories and child categories. We'll talk about a little more of parents and children when we come to pages, but really that's another one you don't really have to pay attention to, and description, completely unnecessary at this point. In fact, if you scroll down, there'll be a little thing that basically says this isn't used for very much. So I'm going to go ahead and choose write in children, scroll on down here and click add new category, and then you will see here I now have a children category. And then I'm going to go ahead and put teens, and add that. You know, do a bit of scrolling here as we go along here. Adults and seniors. Now, this may not be the best way to do it, it's just an example. So you'll now see here that I have a seniors, adults, teens, and children category. Okay, why is this important? Because what happens is that when you then create posts, you can go ahead and those categories will be available for you to choose from automatically. One thing I'll point out here before we go back is let's say you misspelled something, you want to change it. There is an edit feature, and if I go ahead and click edit, it will allow me to change that to maybe I want to change adults and seniors. I can update that, and then maybe delete the one called seniors, because I made a little change yesterday, changed how I wanted to do it. Now, I want to stress that you kind of once you get these set, you kind of want to leave them, you can always add new ones. You don't have to really delete an old one that you've used, you can just leave it as a category that you don't use anymore. So let me show you one other thing why ultimately you want to set up these categories. So even though you may not have watched the create a new post video yet, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to actually create a new post just to show you how it's relevant to here. So this is a post about categories, and I'm just going to blah, blah, blah, and so now if I scroll over here on the right you will see I have my categories listed, and I'm going to go ahead and say this one is relevant to teens. I'm going to go ahead and check teens, go back up here and I'm going to publish my post. And we'll get into a lot more detail in that in the video for creating posts. Okay, so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to hold down my control key and click view post, and what this is going to do is this is going to take me to the post on my website, and you'll now see here that it says this entry was posted in teens on November 10th, 2014 by Michael Sowers. Teens is my category. Now here's the real benefit to this. Let's say somebody comes to your website and they're like, hey, they've got this category called teens here. I want to see what else they've posted about teens. They can just go ahead and click on this category and then what they will see here, you'll see here right across the top category archives teens. This is the actual slug up in the URL up at the top in the address bar here. You'll now see it's this category teens. And then you'll see posts about, in this case, the post about categories, the one and only teens post we have. But these posts will be shown in reverse chronological order, just like all posts. So the newest post will be at the top. And the idea is when you categorize things as teens in our example, they can then click on that teens category and see all of the posts that you've written that fall into that category. If I was to go back here to the Friends of the Aurora Public Library, and I just wanted to see sales, okay? What I'll do here real quick for you is I'll go ahead and visit that site. Just take a moment to come up here, okay? And scroll down here. And here is a all about libraries and books. Here is another one that is all about libraries and books. Here is a members only sale. And this is posted in the sales category. If I go ahead and click sales, what we'll do here is we'll then see category archives sales. And we'll see information about our members only sale, the November sale, the October sale, the September sale, etc. So people can see what I've posted in this category. So with a little pre planning, I think you can neatly organize your posts into these wonderful categories. As a reminder, if you come up with a brand new category, when you write a brand new post, you can always use that add new category link that's available there. And you can always go back into on your posts, the categories screen, and you can update those. And you'll see here now we have one under teens and four under uncategorized. Last thing I'll show you real quick because we have those ones that are uncategorized. I'm going to go back to all posts and this is something you'll see again in the video about creating and editing posts. But if I go ahead here and hover over this as a post and click quick edit, you can see here I can now change the category. So let's say this one was about children. I'll update that. This did you know. I'm going to go ahead and quick edit that. And that's actually going to be relevant to adults and seniors. So I'm going to go ahead and update that. And if I go back to my category screen, you'll now see we have one in adults and seniors, one in children, one in teens, and just two left that are listed as uncategorized. So that's it for categories. I agree. I encourage you to do some pre planning on that. But then you can update it on the fly as you need. As always, if you have any questions, go ahead and leave a comment in the comments area below or drop me a line and I'll be happy to help you out. And thanks for watching.