What is a Category?

A category is the general topic of the post. By setting this you can group together posts of a similar topic in one place for easy viewing. For example, you have a few articles about hurling within your club that you want to add, just create a category named “Hurling” and tag each of the posts with this category. Readers can browse specific categories to see all posts in the category.

They’re important as they help readers navigate your website and add order and structure to the website content.

How to add a Category?

There are two different ways to add a category to your site. We’ve detailed these processes below:

Via Posts Sidebar

• Login to your dashboard.
• Hover over “Posts” on the left hand side menu.
• Click “Categories”.
• Fill out the Name, Parent and Description sections, listed under “Add New Category”
• Click “Add New Category” button to save.

Via Post Edit Screen

• Login to your dashboard.
• Hover over “Posts” on the left hand side menu.
• Click “Categories”.
• Fill out the Name, Parent and Description sections, listed under “Add New Category”.
• Click “Add New Category” button to save.

Featured Category

On your homepage you’ll notice that you have two areas for news posts; Featured & Latest News. The Featured News section is large and is for highlighting the most important news articles. To add an article to the Featured section, you need to:

• Login to your dashboard.
• Click on “Posts” on the left hand side menu.
• Click on an article that you’ve already created to edit or click “Add New” to begin a new one.
• On the right hand side you will see a “Category” box, directly under the Publish box.
• Tick “Featured” to set this as a featured post.
• Also make sure you set a related featured image too so that this image appears on the homepage. Please note that it is important that you use an image that is rectangular (16:9 ratio) to reduce cropping issues. For more information on image cropping please view this article.
• When you’re finished, click on the blue “Update” / “Publish” button to save your changes / Publish your post.

Default Club & County Categories

For your C & C website to operate correctly, we have added a few default categories. Your users will not be able to see these from the front end of your website, you will only see these from your dashboard. It is important that you don’t delete these as it could affect how your site runs.

These categories include:

• contact – used for internal function
• Featured – displays posts in the slider in the homepage
• messages – used for internal function
• event – used for internal function
• games – used for internal function
• generalmessaging – used for internal function
• mobilenews – used for internal function
• Uncategorized – default category for news if one is not added

Best Practices

• We recommend that you have no more than 7-10 categories for content. If you need more, please consider using a tag instead.
• Keep category names short – 2/3 words max. Don’t use sentences!
• Don’t add years to category names. If you want to gather news posts about your county championship over the years, name the category “County Championship” and add the year to the post title instead.
• Don’t create a category that you don’t plan to write about again in the future. In this case, use a tag instead.
• Don’t tag each of your posts with multiple categories, this can confuse the reader. Instead choose 1 category (or a maximum of 2 if it’s unavoidable) to organise your news articles.
• Just remember to use a category like a chapter of a book and a tag like it’s the index!