If you’re starting out on WordPress, you might be a little confused about the difference between pages and posts. They are both channels for your content, but they have totally different purposes.
Pages!
Pages are the static content you would find on a website. You would typically find pages on the navigation bar on the homepage of a website (you know, that bar traditionally at the top of a website that says things like “home, about, contact, etc.”).
These pages are for information that will be a permanent part of your purpose. For example, an About page will always be relevant. Or if you had an acupuncture business, you might elect to have a “History of Acupuncture” page as a static element on your website.
Typical page content:
- About Us
- Bio
- Contact
- Services
- FAQ
- Our Locations
- Menu
- Get Involved
- Donate
Things that probably shouldn’t be pages:
- Events
- Articles
- Rants
- Raves
- Pictures of you at a baseball game
- That link to a cool thing you saw on Pinterest
- An Instagram of your lunch
- A video of you totally ruling at karaoke last weekend.
It’s not that we don’t think those things are cool. We definitely do! We love lots of (appropriate) content (and search engines do too). But there is a place for it, and that place is (drumroll please)…
Posts!
It is easiest to associate posts with blogs, though we like to come up with other names for it (thoughts, news, latest…). They are items of content that appear in a feed, or on top of each other and (usually) in reverse chronological order. So the most recent entries appear first and older entries get archived or tucked away (although worry not, they are still accessible).
This is often used essentially as a kind of journal where you can put anything you feel is relevant. What is acceptable for a post is very open. This is the part where you or your company can communicate your brand. And because of the reverse chronological factor, your brand can evolve right along with you.
The posts can appear in many different places of your WordPress site depending on your theme and settings. It is most commonly featured on a page that you would probably title “Blog”. We are sure you have seen this in play on many websites. If not, keep your eyes open… you’ll be surprised at how many websites have reserved a little section for you to get to know them better.
Also, posts are often interactive — it’s a place where many site owners choose to let readers leave comments and ask questions.
Organizing Your Content
Now that we’ve gone over the basics, let’s discuss some of the ways pages and posts can be organized.
Pages: Subpages
Since pages appear on the navigation bar (a static design element that runs through your entire website), you want to keep them focused on the topic of hand. But you have so much information to get across. You are a one-person wonder machine, full of skills! How will you possibly communicate this in a handful of pages? Subpages!
Subpages go on a dropdown menu that appears when you click or mouse over your page titles on the navigation bar. So if you’re a photography whiz, you can organize your pages into smaller sub-sections. For example, let’s say you do Event, Portrait, and Commercial Photography. That’s a wide spread, and if it’s not organized would be a headache for potential clients.
So you would create subpages. Let’s use Events as the example. Your main page (or as they say in WordPress, Parent Page) will be called Event Photography. The subpages underneath Event Photography could be: Wedding Photography, Sports Photography, Commercial Photography, and each would lead to its own separate page with focused content.
Categories and Tags
Since posts are designed to appear in reverse chronological order, they must be organized in a way other than by order. This happens when you use categories and tags. You create a set of categories/tags that you assign to each post. This organizes the posts and provides access to more focused content.
Categories and tags are so detailed that we wrote a whole post about how to use them.
Did this wet your whistle?
If you want to know more about creating a page or a post, check out our other tutorials:
