Showcase WordPress Content: Custom Archives Page

Creating an Archives page in WordPress is a quick and easy way to showcase your site’s existing content.

All you need to do is create a new page (not post) and select the “Archives” template option under “Page Attributes” in the “Edit Page” section of your WordPress admin panel.

Then, simply publish the blank page and WordPress will automatically pull and display your content by date and category. (You will also want to add your new Archives page to your navigation menu so your readers can find it).

By default, the standard WordPress Archives page looks like this:

As you can see, this standard format displays archived blog posts first by date, then by category. This works out okay for newer blogs because the category listings will still appear above the fold.

However, once you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ll develop a long list of monthly archive links. This, in turn, pushes your category listings further and further down the page – which make it less and less likely that your site visitors will scroll down to check them out.

For this reason, I wasn’t thrilled with the default set-up here on WebCopyResults.com.

I should note that I use the premium Thesis WordPress theme for this site – so I needed to find a solution that would work with that format. Fortunately, I was able to find a quick and easy tutorial on how to create a customized archives page – you can check it out here.

I applied these tweaks to this site (Thesis v.1.8) and it worked like a charm! (If you don’t use the Thesis theme, you can still customize your Archives page – but you’ll most likely need to tweak the code to work with your current theme).

Take a look: WebCopyResults.com Custom Archives Page

(Note: the only modification I made was to increase the font size in the custom.css area from 0.85em to 0.95em  – this simply increased the font size from 85% to 95% of the ‘standard’ font size).

As you can see, this set up now displays categories on top AND showcases the last 50 articles (blog posts) published. The benefit to this, of course, is that it allows readers to immediately see what the site is about (category listings) and get a quick idea of recent topics covered WITHOUT forcing them to scroll down to find it.

I still need to do a little more tweaking. For example, I plan to convert the 3rd tier category listings (e.g., “Week 1″) into tags. (The code provided in the tutorial will also display WordPress tags if you use them on your site). This will further tighten up the category listings in the area above the fold.

(I’ll go over how to quickly convert categories to tags in a future post).

Til Next Time,

PS One of the biggest advantages I’ve found with using the Thesis theme is the ongoing support provided (in both the official help forums and from the active community of enthusiastic fellow users). The tutorial I shared here is just one small example of this at work.