After you have been on WordPress for a while you will start to see your archive section filling up and showing more and more.
As this is actually a waste of space because you can make your own archive page and show things in a far better fashion than filling up the side bar, it is a good idea to do some clean up.
You need to make that space become a far more useful item in your blog rather than showing old posts that are probably way out of date.
To fix this problem you can put in code that will limit the archives you have on display in the sidebar.
You can change the code from this, which is pretty standard in themes.
To read like this.
Change the number to the number that you actually wish to show.
Now if you want to include a page in your categories to show your archives with a pretty good write up and also picture thumbnails, there is a great way of doing this.
The snazzy archives plug-in is a great tool for achieving something a little different in the way of archives.
With this plug-in, you have a whole page of archives, which feature as both a write up with the archive number as well as a thumbnail as I said. There are several layouts available and the effect is very good. I particularly liked the carousel way of showing the relevant achieves. It seemed so unusual but at the same time effective. If you want to show them all together, the full page with the write up and the photo is probably the best way. If you want to do it by month, you could probably do it as 12 different pages. That is as one page for each month of the year.
There are still two more ways of doing it with this plug-in but they are in the experimental stage. One is with clouds and the other is with flash. Vladimir Prelovac is such a pro at what he does you really can’t go wrong.
Should you decide you want to do your own thing without a plug-in you can always create your own archives page. This is an extremely efficient way of doing things and actually scores you points with search engines as they can scroll through far more easily. Not only the search engines find it easier but so do your visitors. If you are going to do this make sure you do it in detail.
Making an archive page should be done in .php. First thing to do is make a blank doc. Name it as the blogarchievs.php for which you need to make a template just for it.
This shows WordPress it’s a different page.
Now create the necessary elements to it including the month by month and the tags as well as the categories.
Your code for months would be like this.
Also list by category to make it easier for the visitor.
Now save the page and place it in your templates folder. Then add a new page in your admin panel. Don’t forget to change the template name to the new template under the templates option. Link it into your navigation.
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