Best way to organize category/subcategory/galleries
NorthernBuck
Registered Users Posts: 99 Big grins
I'm looking for suggestions as far as what you might think the best way for me to organize my site. I shoot many different schools and many different sports at those schools. I had been organizing my categories by school and then breaking down with subcats showing the different sports within that school. As I expand and shoot more schools my main gallery page is becoming more and more busy and seems to be harder to navigate. I'm thinking about using the different sports as the categories and then dividing up the subcats by school. I'm curious to know how some of you are doing it. My site is ZRPhoto.net if anyone wants to have a look.
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My main page has "2009 Sports" and "2008 Sports" as the only sports categories, in that order. As I begin a new year of shooting I will add that year as a new sports category.
Clicking the desired year brings the viewer to another page with all the sports I've shot shown as subcategories. They then click the desired sport and all of that sport's galleries are then displayed in reverse chronological order as "2009 12 05", for example. So, the most recent events, which are always the most popular, are listed first. If they do want to find an older gallery it's easy to scroll down by date.
In addition to the date, I state the teams and the final score of the game, again making it easy to confirm that it is the event they want not only by date but who was playing and who won. So, for example, the baseball gallery they click may say "2009 12 05 Hanover 5 Spring Grove 0."
I can see the benefit in listing each school as a category and then listing all that school's sports events. However, most people who view my site are looking for a particular event or sport, not necessarily to see all of their school's events. That's because people who view my site are mostly players and their families or friends. So, it makes sense to get them to their gallery ASAP.
Listing by school would also pose a problem for me because I shoot both teams roughly equally and if I categorized by school I'd have to duplicate the galleries.
If people just want to see their school's events it's still fairly easy just by clicking the year and sport and then scrolling down to see if/where their school's team is displayed. There aren't so many galleries under each sport that this would be difficult or tedious.
In any event, I agree that you should keep your main page as "clean" as possible and limit the subcategories used or viewers will find it too tedious. I have only rarely had anyone say they had difficulty finding the gallery they desired.
www.attorneyjaysportspics.com
A couple other thoughts. When you go to the page listing all of the school's sports you've shot, do you really need to repeat the school name at each sport category? For example, Fairview Baseball, Fairview Soccer, Fairview Football, etc. The subcategory is "Fairview" so maybe it doesn't need to be repeated with each sport category under it. Just thinking about keeping things streamlined.
That said, I think it would help to at least put the date of the event in the description. I know you show the "date updated" but that is hard to read and not the same as the date of the event.
Just my two cents.
I appreciate the input from both of you. I understand what you're saying about listing the names multiple times. I know I had a reason for doing that but looking at it now I can't remember why. I'm pretty sure it was a good reason though. I wonder if a change was made that made my reason for doing that obsolete? Anyway, I think I'll make that change in the near future.