A lot of time, people get confused between Pages and Posts in WordPress. This is a common issue since they both can look exactly alike! You can make a page look like a post; you can make a post look just like a page. How do you determine what the difference is?
The answer to this last question is simple聽 – there is no need to know the difference as you are READING info on the site. It is important, however, for you to know the difference as a site owner!
So, what is the difference between Pages and Posts?
Posts
You can think of posts as a diary type listing, except businesses and information sites all use them too. Depending on how you set up your posts they are usually listed in reverse chronological order just like a diary with the nearest date being at the top of the list.
All posts appear on the home page, or the blog page, or even a “news” page, depending how you set up your blog posts to appear in your settings area of your dashboard. You also have an archive of posts in which anyone can see old posts and entries.
Readers can read posts via a few methods, such as clicking on categories, recent posts, archives and even via RSS feed. They all have a category (or multiple categories) and can be tagged too. The great thing about WordPress is that you are in complete control of who, how and when anyone sees your blog posts via your settings area of your Dashboard.
Pages
Think of pages as static website pages just like “old style” websites used to have. These pages don’t use categories or tags to differentiate themselves.
Like blog posts, there is no limit to the number of pages you can make on your WordPress website or blog. You can hide pages from view, and link to them on other pages, or make them private completely. You can make pages main menu items, and submenu items using various plugins and features depending upon the theme you choose.
Unlike a blog post, when you create the new page, you will create it and usually not change it. A good way to think of this is that every menu item is a page including your Contact page, your About page and so on.
HI again Paul. I’m good with the pages vs posts thing, but for some reason I can’t get the pages to display the way I want them to in my Genesis theme. Ok, truthfully, I haven’t spent the trillion hours needed to figure it out yet, but the drop down menu isn’t working for me. It’s all such a learning process, isn’t it? And just as I start to figure things out,the theme updates and I’m back a few steps. Oh well, that’s the way of WP. I guess I could always have started with Blogger. 馃檪 Nice visiting with you again; hope your week is shaping up well. 馃檪
We are limited to the number of static pages that we have on Blogger…but I am still not sure that I want to switch.
My personal rule for pages is that I use them for things that should be static. That way they’re always positioned where I want them, the thing that annoys me is that naming convention seems to matter for page order (unless I’ve missed something in my settings.)
Melissa – When you talk about Naming Convention mattering for page order, are you referring to in your Menus? You can cahnge that!