Categories, Tags, and Taxonomies

Categorizing your work will make it easier for users to navigate and we can use several methods to categorize our work. WordPress has a chronological means of organization built in, but we can also organize by Category, Tags, and Taxonomies.

Why?

We want visitors to find what they are looking for as easily as possible. By having several ways that users can make their way through your bodies of work, they can find what they are looking for more quickly and easily. This is good.

Defining our terms

We’re going to deal with 3 types of organization; Categories, Tags, and The Media Taxonomy.

A Category should be higher level classifications and any one piece should only be contained within one category. Think about how you can organize your work in broad strokes. These categories can be anything you like (medium, body of work, 2D, 3D, indoor, outdoor, gallery, public art, etc). You don’t need many categories, in some cases you might only have one to three, because categories generally differentiate between the broad kinds of work you make. For more granular organizing, you can use tags. For more, read about Categories on the WordPress Codex.

A Tag is a keyword that can be associated with your piece. You can have as many tags as you want.

The Media Taxonomy is specific to WPFolio and allows you to create special tags to identify the media of a work. This will help users navigate your work based on materials you use.

Let’s try it

What terms would we use to classify this painting?

Let’s put it all together with the Mondrian painting at right.

The Category would depend on all the work we were showing on the site and the broader categories we were using. Possible categories might be; Paintings, Primary Color Series, or Late Career for example. These categories would help users see other paintings, other work in the Primary Color Series, or from Mondrian’ later work.

Tags associated with the piece are many and could include; red, yellow, blue, painting, oil, geometric, blocks, line, jazz, modern, etc. As you accumulate more tags with other pieces, users can click on the tags and see more work containing those tags.

The Media Taxonomy here could be painting, oil painiting, or oil on canvas depending on how we were organizing the site. Think of the Media Taxonomy like the label in a gallery or museum. What would you write as the media on the label?

Keep In Mind

• This is not for your resume, or artists statement, or other static pages.
• Each work should have one Category but can contain several tags.

Creating a Category

Your categories can appear in the navigation bar of your site. When clicked, WPFolio will display all the posts within that category.

1. Create the categories you want to use in Posts > Categories section of the WordPress interface (figure A). You can add, delete, or rename categories here (figure B).
   

   Figure A

   

   figure B - adding a category

2. Then as you add your work to your site, place each post you create into a Category by simply checking the corresponding toggle box in the category menu in the Write Post interface.
   

   Figure C - select a category

Adding Tags

In the Write Post panel, you can add tags (as well as in the “Quick Edit” view on the Posts page of WordPress Admin Interface).

Adding Tags

Adding Media Taxonomy

Very similar to adding tags, but keywords are for the media you used in the piece

Video on Categories and Tags