We all work hard on our posts and too often visitors will come to our blogs to see our most recent post and then leave, as if there’s nothing left to see. I used to be glad when visitors would visit at all and over time I knew that what I’d written previously was still interesting and relevant but how to let my readers know?
How could I display more of my content to my readers?
I saw blogs with an index and found myself looking through some of their older posts. That’s when I started looking for a plugin that would allow me to customize an index so it would fit in with my blog’s theme. No such thing!
There were indexes within themes but I had to include all my categories and that’s not what I wanted. In my case it was recipes and I didn’t want to include my musings, blog and restaurant reviews, interviews with other bloggers and the like. I was told I could do it all manually but I’m a cook, not a geek.
Thankfully, I married a geek and in the same way I got him to agree to write the EasyRecipe plugin, I batted my eyelashes and reminded him that I cook dinner every night and I do all his laundry. “Yes, dear,” was the reply.
What I wanted was an index that I could easily make changes. What if I could change the shape of my photos in the index – like circles or odd shapes? What if I could choose rounded corners instead of square? What if I could put a tasteful background behind everything? How about changing the spacing between the images or between the rows?
He looked at me and said, “Anything else?”
“Yes, I want to be able to move sliders or adjust something and see the changes instantly,” I said.
There is a reason why nobody else has written a plugin like this — it’s not easy but when he finished, I loved it. Within just a few weeks of my index going live, I noticed more and more traffic hitting older posts. Since the index is customizable, I could choose photos of my most popular posts to be the front image of the index category. So my American flakey, buttery breakfast biscuits went right up front.
Hits to my previous posts went up almost immediately by 24%. For a small blog like mine, that was massive! Whether you use our free EasyIndex Plugin or our EasyIndex Plus Plugin for WordPress self-hosted blogs or not, consider adding an index of your content whether its car parts, food, knitting patterns, kids’ toys or more.
