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WordPress: Post Or Page?

The WordPress PostWordPress Logo

WordPress is primarily a blogging platform, a place where you make "posts" about topics of interest to you (and hopefully your readers) and then engage in a dialogue with your visitors.

Whenever you make a post, remember to assign a category (or even subcategory) to your post gets "filed" in the right area of your site (it's actually being stored in a database, but you get the idea).

When you or one of your editors/administrators make a post, it is immediately added to your website. When a visitor posts a reply, however, it is not published until you (or the person who wrote the original post) approves it. You'll receive an email letting you know someone has posted a reply. Just login to either approve or delete, should you wish to not publish.

Keep in mind blogging is all about 2-way communication. And not only on your site, but others. If Social Networking is truly on your list of things to do, you need to be active not only posting your own blog posts, but being part of other conversations as well.

Note, your list of categories will not show on the front end until there is a post linked to one or more categories

The WordPress Page

A WordPress page is in simple terms a "static page" on your site. These are the pages that make up the content of your site, such as the Home, About, Services, Contact, etc.

Make sure you deselect Comments and Trackbacks on these static pages; you don't need people telling you how much they like (or don't like!) your content...then again, this is up to you!

When you create a new page, the name you give it is also what will appear as the "button" name or label in the navigation. So, you'll want to keep this short, depending on whether you have single level or multi-level navigation (and if you have vertical, horizontal or both). You're also creating the page URL at this time, so keep in mind and note that WordPress automatically separates your title with dashes and makes them lower case: Pet Sitting Services > pet-sitting-services.

You'll want to type in your own H1 title in the editor for search engine purposes; use the What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor for this (click the Visual Editor tab).

Be sure to read (download) this great how-to on using the built-in WYSIWYG (PDF 260KB) within WordPress. Do keep in mind that your site was built using CSS. This means by default your headings, fonts and special classes are already defined. Thus, for continuity, you will want to avoid assigning font classes or colors unless you really, really, want to ;-).

Make sure every page is optimized for search engines. We'll cover this in the Search Engine Optimization section.

We use a popular plugin (read more on plugins) to help you put your pages in the order you prefer. If your site consists of both a vertical AND horizontal menu, this is likely a customized script and you'll need to identify which pages below to the top (horizontal) level through the custom interface we have provided you.

Sometimes you want to create a page but don't want it to be part of the navigation, such as your privacy statement, terms of service, etc. We've installed a plugin for this purpose so that you can identify if a page should NOT be included in the navigation, but you can still link to it and display its contents.

You may intentionally want a page to be hidden altogether from the navigation -- maybe a special page just for new clients, an AdWords landing page, etc.

Taking Out the Trash

There are times when you decide to delete a page, either because you want to start over again, it's outdated, etc. Do keep in mind that if a page has been in existence for quite some time, deleting it might not be good search-engine wise. If you do, consider doing a redirect on the page (302) to a page it replaces.

Here are a few tips when you want to delete a page:

  • When you delete a post or a page, you are able to undo that action if you decide to at a later date (by going to the Trash and reinstalling). 
  • But until you permanently delete these (especially pages), they will show up on your pageMash plugin page (but they aren't visible to visitors). 
  • Permanently deleting them will send them off to Internet-heaven!