The Death of Date Based Blog Archives
When I was designing Shiny Toy Robots, I thought momentarily about including a link to date based blog archives. We’ve all see these, the list of months in the sidebar of a blog that links to past articles. They’re still part of most blogging platforms’ default layout. When was the last time you used them? When was the last time that you looked at a site and thought, “I really want to see what they wrote in July 2010″? I’m betting probably never.
Expiring by stealth
Funnily enough, I still thought of date based archives as a general norm, even when I was deciding to abandon them for my site. A quick look around the web this morning demonstrated that I was wrong. Apparently, without anyone really noticing, the date based blog archive list is becoming rarer. I took a quick glance at about fifteen tech and web design blogs that I read regularly, and none of them had a visible list of past articles sorted by date.
They weren’t very important
Date based archives don’t really make much sense. It’s not a natural way for users to browse content. They’ll use the search function, category links, or tags. That kind of navigation also provides greater search engine benefit, because you’re linking topics related by much more relevant information than simply the date they were published. It surprises me that date based archives remained such a generally accepted part of blog navigation for so long.
It’s obviously a good thing to try and maintain strong traffic to older content on a blog. There are lots of other options in addition to focusing on categories and tags when linking to archive indexes. A good example is the RelatedPosts plugin for WordPress, which gives users the opportunity to read other articles directly related to the content they’re reading now. The Popular Posts plugin I use on this site highlights the best content on your blog (though it focuses on content of maximum a year old). Date based blog archives are not a great way of highlighting this content.
Reconsidering the accepted defaults
The wider point here is that it’s easy to simply assume that because something is a default option, or widely used, it’s a good thing. That’s not always the case. It’s important to keep reassessing even generally accepted concepts of web design and navigation. While many standards exist for good reason, never do something just because that’s the way it’s always done.
If you enjoyed this post, why not subscribe to receive all the latest stories from Shiny Toy Robots?
