Every post you write is stored in the database permanently, and is always accessible via it’s direct link. But what if you don’t have the permalink URL and you’re trying to find a post? You use the ever-important search box. But what if you don’t know enough of the title, or what if you just want to browse through old posts? It’s in your best interests to make it easy to do both, afer all, it will increase your page views.

A default blog on Blog*Spot or WordPress.com doesn’t have much in the way of archive navigation, and most self-hosted blog installs aren’t much better out of the box. They often have huge monthly archive lists in their sidebars, maybe a category listing as well.

That’s not the way to handle things. It makes sense to have a category listing, but do not list date-based archives in your sidebar. They take up a lot of space, and they’re not very helpful to the user.

A better strategy is to put category links in your sidebar, or somewhere in the template. Then have an Archives page to help people look through your older posts. You could handle this in a variety of ways. You could have a huge list of every post you ever wrote (as seen on Daily Blog Tips), a category-based listing, or you could put together a hybrid page that allows you to navigate by date, tag, category, or other criteria.

At the moment, I have a scheme like that on my Archives page. There’s a search field, a tag cloud, date-based archive links handled with the Smarter Archives plugin, as well as my featured posts setup, which helps show-off some of what I consider to be my better content.

Anyway, my point is you should definitely put some thought into the navigation of your archives. You’ve probably authored some interesting content in the past, it would be a shame for your newer readers to miss it.

Not everyone has read everyone of your posts as they came out, and people often want to return to pages they’d read before.

Date-based archives aren’t any help. They may be the least-useful of blog navigation techniques. Sure, there may be times when you want to see the posts from a specific month, but not very often.

Search forms are great, possibly the best navigation method used on blogs today, but you have to know what so search before it’s of any use.

Then you have tags and categories, which have their uses, but are just another way to sort data. You need to have tags and/or categories on your blog. They help people find what they’re looking for, though if you have 3+ years of posts in your archives, it may still take awhile to find the posts worth reading.

The posts worth reading…

Essentially, you want a place to highlight your best work, the posts that everyone should read. While you obviously still have a lot of good stuff in your archives, to be unearthed by readers when they need it, this page would have the posts you want everyone to see right away.

Thinking about this, I ended up building my Featured Posts page, which is essentially a yearly archive of a “Featured” category I use for this purpose. Here’s how to set it up.

My Featured Posts scheme helps, but it’s not the ultimate answer. It’s just one piece of the blog navigation puzzle.