WordPress websites: Posts vs. Pages
| Web Development Team |
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Despite WordPress being greatly intuitive, if you've never used it before, the distinction between Posts and Pages can be a little confusing. This page will help clear up any ambiguity.
What's a blog?
It might be best to understand the definition of a blog before we delve into this. Wikipedia says the definition is as follows:
- A blog (a contraction of the term "Web log") is a Web site, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order.
Posts
Posts are the bread-and-butter of a blog, most blogs you see probably only have posts, and not pages. Each time the writer of the blog has a new piece of news they want to put on the blog, they insert it into the blog software, and then it becomes the top story on the website. Then, the writer submits a new article for the blog, which becomes the top story, pushing the previous story down the line.
Posts can always be found in the "archive" of the blog, and are usually categorized in two ways: by date, and by subject. So, the blog software will automatically organize the posts, in the archive, by the date -- usually giving you the option to search by year, and then month. You then assign each blog one, or multiple categories. So, a story about tulips in the Netherlands might go under "flowers" and "the Netherlands" categories. A story about earnings on Wall Street might go under "finance."
The content of a post can be changed after it is posted, but generally we think of a post as being a "completed work." You write your post, you submit, and then it stays as it is posted in perpetuity. Again, you could update it to add a quick followup note, or fix spelling, but generally a posts stays mostly the same after it is posted.
Pages
Pages, unlike posts, are for information relevant on a daily, "referential" basis, not are generally not newsworthy. So, for our purposes, a page is going to contain information that rarely changes, but that people are going to want to regularly check on. For example, we might post our ship's stats on a page. We want this information to be readily available on the site, and this information is not going to change often.
Unlike a post, a page does not get "pushed down" as new content is posted. Pages are linked-to directly in the sidebar of the website, so people can always find them quickly. We don't think of them as a "completed work," like a post, because the information may change after a few days, weeks, or months, at which point we can update it easily. We might want to create a new post, however, announcing that information on one of the pages have changed!