I have a simple tip for everyone today on how to make your WordPress blog look more professional. This tip is especially important to newer bloggers who sometimes forget to add categories to their posts.

I hate seeing that any blog has posts under the Uncategorized category. This is the default category that WordPress created for everything that is not otherwise categorized to be stuffed into. It just looks bad to leave things this way, but there is a very simple solution to this problem: get rid of uncategorized.

You can’t just delete the category though, as it is the default category and thus, doesn’t have a delete option in the WordPress administration.

You can however, edit the category.

After clicking on edit, next to uncategorized, you will be brought to a screen similar to the one below.

You can then change the category name and the category slug to something else. I usually select something like News, General News, or Site News. I find these all sound much better than the default uncategorized and to readers, it will look as though you gave your post a category, even if you forgot.

Note: This will change the permalinks of any post that was previously under uncategorized to now using whatever post slug you entered in the edit screen.

Originally posted on September 21, 2007 @ 7:34 pm