Advice on restructuring my site - cats and tags

My site has much more content than it once did and I would like to organize it a little better for the visitors and UX.

Let's say my site has mainly shoe reviews on it. How would you go about organizing the articles using categories and tags?

Right now I don't use tags at all. I've got categories like:

"nike shoes"
"reebok shoes"
"tips on running"
"Under Armour shoes"

But I'm starting to feel like perhaps I'd be better off like this:
CATS:
"running shoes"
"cross training shoes"
"hiking shoes"
TAGS:
"blue shoes"
"red shoes"
"leather shoes"


And what, if any, are the possible SEO damages I may cause by shifting things around a bit?

Suggestions? Thanks!

Suggestions?

hello,
i think you should create a lot of filters to allow users to see brands and categories at the same time.

filters? What sort of way would you do that in Wordpress? I'm not familiar with "filters", only tags and categories.

Thanks!

You should vistit some M commerce site to check and get idea. Generally they put filters to get results of proper item that purchaser wants. Like, Someboddy wants Nike shoes with red colour, he just clicks on filters in Brand --> NIKE and in Colour --> RED. He immediately gets results for red nike shoes available on your site. I hope I understood right your requirement.

I'm not a fan of tags myself; they'd be ok with rel=canonical applied (lessens duplicate content risk and directs any natural links you get on the tag URL to the proper URL). I like to keep it simple and not use them. That being said BTB has stated in several threads that he uses them with no detriment.

Speaking of filters, I've been looking at this (I don't need it - yet).
https://wordpress.org/plugins/beautiful-taxonomy-filters/