So, let’s talk about taxonomy and the theme of my website.

Taxonomy

The verb (or adjective? Not sure – I didn’t go to uni to do an English degree!) for ‘tagging’, something that every Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook user does on a daily basis! Why tag though? Why does every Instagram post have a million-and-one tags and why do you get no love when you don’t tag, but 17 likes within 4 seconds of posting your latest #mirrorselfie when you do? Easy – it’s because people on social media networks are searching for the words that you’ve tagged, so if you tag your posts with popular search terms like ‘selfie’, ‘mirrorselfie’, ‘partyselfie’, ‘bathroomselfie’… you see where I’m going? You’ll get more hits!

So, to make it easier to find content on my blog, I’ve started a taxonomy system which means that I will tag posts with the relevant terms and you’ll be able to find them more easily, like them more easily, share them more easily and then I get more exposure which makes me happy too!

Let me give you an example: I’ve just written an article about the HTML 5 Canvas method and the inline SVG feature, which you can read here. This article is tagged with words such as ‘html’, ‘html5’, ‘web’, ‘web development’ and ‘week 1’ which are all relevant to the content of that article. This means that if you search for any of those terms you’ll hopefully find that article in there somewhere.

This article is all about design and taxonomy and tagging, so it’s tagged with words such as ‘design’, ‘taxonomy’ and ‘tagging’. Spooky, eh?

The theme

What do I look for in a theme? Being into photography, big pictures are my thing and that’s exactly what this theme offers! At the time of writing this I am using a free WordPress theme called Brand which in my mind looks elegant, sophisticated, modern and also works across a range of devices such as desktop and mobile devices. Generally I’m a much bigger fan of dark interfaces than I am white interfaces and I also like to see content not white space, hence why I don’t like this modern obsession of ‘lots of white space = clean and professional and hip, yo?’ which is also why this theme appeals to me. I like subtle animations here and there that add value and interest to a website without being over the top (check out Ling’s Cars if you want over the top animations!) and this theme also offers that too. I could modify it in the future and add more animations and graphics to suit my needs, but isn’t it funny how this theme also resembles my initial university portfolio website which I made myself using Adobe Muse? It seems I ‘have a type’ and not just in women!