Billy Irish

Difference Between a Wordpress Page and A Wordpress Post



Posted: Tuesday, October 19, 2010

by Billy Irish
BillyIrish.com

One of the points that many new Wordpress bloggers get hung up on is the difference between a Page and a Post. There are some very important differences that, like anything else, once you understand are pretty simple to keep straight. With a Wordpress website you can have an unlimited number of each and it comes down to how your site is organized.

First let's talk about pages. A Wordpress page is a static web page like you'll see on most any website. Typical uses for a page are the About Page or Contact Page. Pages stand on their own and do not get included in a category, nor in your RSS feeds. If we forget about Posts altogether for a second you could very easily build an entire website just with pages. So, a page is just a page. This is one of the greatest things about the Wordpress application is the insane about of flexibility that the software offers.

Now, Posts. For one thing posts are time stamped. They also get included in a category, they get tags, they do show up in your RSS feed. Posts are the format that most people associate with the blog style of website. If you were creating a blog about cats and you created a published a new post every day then you would see those posts displayed in reverse chronological orderso newest at top and oldest at the bottom.

Now here's the tricky bit. Posts display on a page. Think of pages like a sheet of paper and posts like those yellow Post-it notes that you can stick to a piece of paper in difference order.

With posts in Wordpress you as the webmaster have a great deal of control over how they are displayed. For example if you have three categories (say black cats, white cats, gray cats) when a user clicks on the black cat category link all the posts you have written on black cats will be displayed. The same holds true for tags. When a user clicks on a specific tag then all the posted you have associated with that tag will be displayed.

When starting out the easiest way I found to determine if the content I was going to write about what to go on a Page or a Post was to determine if I would want it in a category. If the content fit one of my existing categories, or one that I wanted to create, it was a post. If I wanted to make a static bit of content like an About Me it's a page. It may sound confusing but play around a bit and you'll get it.
Visit BillyIrish.com for tips on creating, managing and getting the most from your small business website. Bill has been working for and running small businesses his entire life and helps others increase profits and sales from their small business websites. Get some small business website help!

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