---
title: "Struggling to Set up a Category Structure for Your Forum? Here's How We Did It"
date: 2021-12-09
author: "David Wippel"
category: "Remote Work"
url: https://www.davidwippel.com/blog/struggling-to-set-up-a-category-structure-for-your-forum-here-is-how-we-did-it
---

# Struggling to Set up a Category Structure for Your Forum? Here's How We Did It

Building the foundation of your [“Communication Pyramid”](/blog/the-communication-pyramid-for-remote-teams-what-it-is-and-why-you-need-to-define-yours) (for reference, see last essay) is essential.
We use discourse for most of our asynchronous communication.

After playing around with different category setups, we settled with a simple structure.

TRIGO is a software development business. There are very specific categories for our needs, but you should be able to map them to your business.

_Let's dive into them:_

## Announcements

All kind of company-wide announcements goes here. New hires, policy changes, process adoptions. Things everyone should be aware of.

## Water cooler

This category is for all non-project related stuff. For instance, discussions if we should do a Christmas cleaning for our notion pages (we got a LOT!) or how we want to use our Discord server happens in this category.

## Events

We like to see each other in-person from time to time. Believe it or not. Planning for such happenings goes here.

## Engineering

This is the place for all discussions about code guidelines, software architecture, the newest OpenShift improvements and more.

## Areas of Interest

We exchange ideas about new UX trends or an upcoming marketing campaign here. We have created some sub-categories here over time: _User Experience, Cloud-Native, User Interface, Developer Experience, Marketing, Sales and Project Management._

## Projects

Finally, all project related stuff goes here. From Discussions about software requirements, software architecture and how to handle a certain situation with a customer.

> Don't overcomplicate things, people will get overwhelmed by the new medium this way. Keep it straight and simple.