Beginners guide to using tags
You’ve probably come across tags before; they are labels you assign to things. Encrypted Post Type uses tags, and you can assign any post any number of tags.
If used well tags can be of great help to organise your content – but it’s important to be disciplined with tags – you can create any kind of organisational structure with them, including adding hierarchy.
If you’ve never used tags before, then think of them as folders that allow content to be in more than 1 folder at a time. Viewed in these terms, tags are a way to group content, with the added flexibility of allowing content to ‘live’ in more than 1 place. If you’re wondering how to start using tags, then start with just an Inbox tag, and tag every post you create with it – treat the inbox as the place where everything initially goes (sort of like your email inbox – but with the benefit of not allowing junk email to fill it up). You should never get stuck figuring out where to put something before you start creating it – if that happens then friction will develop and you’ll find that you create less. So, the aim is to have no friction from when you have an idea to getting that idea out of your head, so the Inbox can be a place for things to live initially.
Once you have an Inbox tag, start assigning posts additional tags as needed – for example, if you create a post writing about your sons first steps, or first day in school, then tag it with your sons name (e.g. ‘Zach’), and also tag it with ‘Family’, and remove the inbox tag from the post because it now in-effect moves out of the inbox and in to the ‘Zach’ and ‘Family’ tags. In time, you might create more posts about Zach and other family members, so these tags act as the go-to places for all your content about your son and family. In this example, you can see the benefit of tags over categories or folders; tags encourage you to group things that are similar, without worrying that content is placed in the wrong category or folder.
You can gradually refine your tags as and when you need to. This is the beauty of tags, they can change and grow organically.