Posts vs Pages – What’s the Difference?

You’ve installed WordPress, and you’re ready to start setting up your site. YAY! Setting up the site is the hardest part (sometimes it’s easiest depending on what host you use…). But now you’re ready to start putting together your website. You can actually start populating your website before you apply a theme or a look and feel, but personally, I would choose a good template first. But, all that aside, let’s say you’re ready to go. You are ready for some content. How do you set up your website? The first thing you need to consider is the difference between the two types of content WordPress allows you to create. Posts and Pages. We’ll start with pages first, because they are easier to explain.

Pages

The reason to create Pages in wordpress is for any content that doesn’t change much… sometimes they’re called  static pages or static content.  Good examples of a static page might be an about us page, an about this website, a privacy policy or a find me page. You know, something that doesn’t change much and gives you the ability to further describe the website. Pages are also good because they allow you to build a hierarchy of your website and you can “nest” pages under other pages, and they can help define the structure of your website outside of the posts. In actuality, if you wanted to build a website without posts, you could, and it essentially becomes a website with static pages of information without a blog. In other words, it’s a traditional website structured by static pages. Let’s talk about how you can create a page.

Creating a page

• After you log into your wordpress site, go to the column on the left hand side and move your mouse over Pages > Add New.
• Enter the title of the page in the top text field.
• In the text formatting area, enter your content, and format it the way you need it to look.
• If you’ve finished formatting your text, in the right column, hit the Publish button.
• If you’re not finished editing your page, you can hit the Save Draft button and it will save a draft of your page without actually publishing it to the site. (Hey, that’s pretty cool!)

Posts

So, what are posts? The posts function of WordPress is the blog functionality in it’s truest form. Let’s say you’re chronicling, say, oh, maybe your weight loss. And you want to keep a record of how well, or how difficult it is to lose the weight. And let’s say you want to talk about everything you do related to the weight loss… say, you want to talk about the exercises you’re doing in losing weight, or you want to talk about the types of food you’re eating or prehaps the recipes you’re eating during your weight loss, or maybe you just want to do weigh ins or just simply talk about how you feel. Posts are PERFECT for this type of content.

All posts are time stamped, which is great for keeping track of your content. You can change the post date as well, so if you want to post something and date it further back in time, you can do that. You can also postdate and schedule your posts, thus allowing you to set up your site with a week’s worth of content well ahead of a given date, you can do that too and the site will automatically post your information on that given date! HOT!!! You can also categorize your posts with categories and further connect and describe your posts by tagging information. So, posts are essentially a running log of all the content you post on your site on a timely basis, and the more content you push into your site, the better your chances of your site being picked up by a search engine (search engines like change in a web site). So, how do you create a post?

Creating a post

• To create post, go to the left hand side of your admin area in WordPress and go to Posts > Add New.
• Apply a Title for your Post in the top text field underneath the Add New Post text.
• Next up, add your content in the text formatting area. Format it the way you want and make it beautiful.
• Next, on the right hand column, you’ll want to categorize your post. You’ll see an area that says categories. You can create a category for your post if you don’t have one. (Important note about categories… don’t go crazy with categories. Your categories should have some structure to them… we will discuss categories later, but your blog post should always be a part of a category. In fact, it is IMPOSSIBLE for a blog post to not have category.)
• Below Categories, you’ll see an area for Tags. Tags allow you to further describe your content by tagging the post with relevant keywords about the post. Now, this is where you can go crazy with describing your post. Tags also allow your users to connect to other posts that share the same keywords, so it’s almost like a second tier of categorization for your posts. NICE!
• If you’re done you can push the Publish button and your post will be pushed live to your website.
• If you want to predate or postdate your post, in the Publish area on the right hand column, you’ll see an area that says Publish Immediately. If you click on the edit button, you can change the date and time for when you want your content to post. (in the past, in the future, whatever you want)
• If you aren’t ready to post your content, you can also click the Save Draft button and it will save your content without posting it to the blog.

Great job! We’ll over the finer details of posting content a little later. (like formatting content and adding images. You may have already figured it out, but if you haven’t, I’ll have something for you later.)