There are multiple ways to print content on the front end. The “best” way depends on the details of the project and your description is very superficial.
The option I can think of are:
- Just edit the appropriate theme template to use
has_category
to display your links to the category URLs - Do the same as above but use a filter on
the_contentto avoid
editing the template files. Good if you may use multiple themes, not
just one, or if this needs to be portable to other sites. - Use a widget. This can be a bit trickier but I don’t know about
“messy”.
Which is “best”? Or better than a widget? No idea. That depends on what you need to do, where you need to place the content, etc.