Themes And Category Display

[Jeffro]

Here is one thing I don't get. Why do themes whether they be free or premium even bother listing categories either horizontally or vertically in the theme? I use quite a few categories and I imagine most bloggers have at least 7 categories or more. Most of the time, this number of categories goes above and beyond what can be displayed in the horizontal or vertical layout for the wp_list_categories function. Which brings me back to my original question, why bother having something like that in a theme in the first place?

[tekzt]

Are there really themes with a limit for vertical listing? i´m actually not sure if i will use a list on my new theme or if it will be some playfull javastuff, but i fear most users won´t even recognize how it works.

i still think theres a need for category listing. Right now i´m working on the website of a sportsclub. they need the categories for their news, because they will post soccer news, club news, tennis news etc...

What other options are there than a category listing? I think your categories should be accessible directly from your frontpage.. to stay on that sportsclub project: someone who is a fan of the tennis team might not be interested in the soccer team, so they will only see the tennis news with one click. i´m actually not sure if you were trying to say that theres no need to display categories on the frontpage or if you were looking for another solution for displaying categories or even something else my limited mind didn´t catch (i assume that you don´t think that categories as a whole are useless lol).

[itsananderson]

For the most part I think category lists should be left in widgets, but some themes could use them well outside the widget context. I think photography themes are a good place for them as a horizontal list for example.

[andrew]

The problem is that people aint as careful with their categories as they outghta be.

There is debate as to whether 6 or 7 is the ideal number / the number beyond which making decisions starts to become difficult, but if you treat your categories as a categorisation system that requires control and order then 7 top level categories should be plenty.

[greenshady]

I'll have to agree with Andrew here. People simply make too many categories. There are some sites where more categories may be needed though, but that's not the norm.

I would only design a theme with a horizontal category list if it would be beneficial. For example, I recently designed a news theme. The predominant navigation is the category menu with that theme. It's only logical that a news-style theme have this type of navigation. The problem only arises when users download the theme and use it for sites that aren't news sites with carefully-planned categories.

I think the real problem is that people aren't using tags as a means of effective categorization.

[tekzt]

I think the real problem is that people aren't using tags as a means of effective categorization.

Or Sub-Categories. That might be an issue of Category Listing within Themes. Some don´t show Sub-Categories as Sub-Categories but include them in the Top-Category-Level-Listing.

[Len]

I'll have to agree with Andrew here. People simply make too many categories.

I'd agree with that. I'm also guilty of that. I recently "reformatted" my install and merged several categories so that I now have it down to a reasonable six.

[neovita]

I like the horizontal categories if they support nesting.

I try to keep the number of categories low and use tags for more specific topics. Since switching to horizontal categories on www.ThomasUmstattd.com my homepage bounce rate has gone WAY down.