In my recap of the history of the Mercheum, I mentioned how deciding to start a website caused me to start paying more attention to the websites I already visited. I examined their layout, the features they offered, and tried to determine if they were using WordPress or some other platform. Many of these websites had a date archive navigation in a sidebar. While that functionality is built into WordPress, I felt it was a poor fit for what I wanted to achieve, and did not include it in the Mercheum website layout. Instead, I set up custom taxonomies for manufacturer, copyright date, item type and characters, and used these taxonomies to create the “Browse Collection By” tree found in the left navigation bar.
I just finished reading “Archive SEO: archive by topic, not by date” by Joost de Valk. Joost says visitors want to find posts about specific topics, not posts written in a specific month. However,
“Sadly, a lot of blogs still only use archives based on dates. To make matters worse, a lot of the time these archives are displayed in the sidebar.”
This precisely matched what I had seen! Reading this article helped me feel that I had made the correct decision in not including the date archive. How do you feel? Do you find the Harvey Mercheum website easy to navigate? Would you like to see a date archive in the sidebar, instead of or in addition to the existing navigation? Let me know in the comments below or use the Contact the Curator form!
