New Simplified Menu Structure

I was working on redirecting 404 not found error pages.  One thing lead to another.  And,  I ended up improving the navigational system of my blog.  And, I even managed to get rid of a lot of the excessive circular linking, so characteristic of WordPress blogs.

Turns out that I was structurally missing the index pages for a number of simulated directories.  The permalinks of this blog are set up to imitate a static Web site.  The Yahoo search engine bot was actually looking for one of these pages.  So, I added three new pages to fill in all the gaps in the simulated link structure of this blog.  Next, I had to dream up something to put in these pages so that they wouldn’t be redundant.

Simplified Menu Structure

Then I took another look at the Breadcrumb plugin.  Even the latest version was still horribly bad.  It simply did not do what it said that it would.  It worked for pages, but the posts links were a joke.  So, I started thinking: Why not just add these three new pages to the menu structure so that visitors would actually use them?  Seemed like a great idea to me.  And now, I have  implemented a sort of breadcrumb navigation system that actually works because it logically imitates the directory structure of a static Web site.

All of the posts and archives feed off the Post Archive page.  All of the categories now feed off of the Category Page.  While all of the tags feed off of one centralized tag page.  Originally, I had a listing of all the posts on the post page.  But, WordPress for some reason was treating it like it was the home page for some screwy reason, so i had to remove the post listing.

Next, I removed a bunch of the duplicate link clutter from all the sidebars.

I added another plugin that created page numbers for the post listings off of the category, archive, and tag listings. Now, you can directly go to the last page. Or skip, some ten pages without having to page through it, one page at time.

Last but not least, my home page is now being used only to briefly introduce the new posts for a limited period of time.  This means that the archive pages are nolonger simply duplicating the home page.  Thus, I have managed to to turn the archive pages into original content.