WordPress has another, complementary way to showcase content, called pages.
Unlike posts, pages aren’t dated, categorized, or tagged. They exist independently
of posts. The easiest way to understand the role of WordPress pages is to think of
them as ordinary web pages, like the kind you might compose in an HTML editor
NOTE Pages don’t have categories and tags, they aren’t listed in chronological order, and you can’t browse
them by date. However, they still have some WordPress smarts. Most notably, they get their formatting instructions
from WordPress themes, just like every other part of your site. In most themes, a basic page looks a lot like
a basic post—for example, both use the same fonts for their title and text.
Understanding Pages
Why do some people call pages “static pages”?
Although WordPress calls this feature pages, many webheads
find that confusing. After all, isn’t a page anything you view on
the Web with a browser? And don’t posts appear in web pages?
For these reasons, WordPress experts—and WordPress itself,
sometimes—often use a different term. They call WordPress
pages static pages. Sadly, this term is almost as confusing.
It stems from the old days of the Web, when designers distinguished
between dynamic pages that could do incredible
feats with the help of code, and static pages that showed fixed,
unchanging content. That fits with the way most people use
WordPress pages—they create them, fill them with content,
and then publish them.
However, WordPress pages aren’t really static—they do change.
Flip your blog over to a different theme, and all your posts
and pages update seamlessly to match the new style. That’s
because WordPress stores all the content for your pages—as
well as the content for the rest of your site, including posts—in
its database. And, finally, a static page changes anytime you
decide to edit it.
If you’re still confused, here’s the bottom line: A WordPress
site can hold both posts and pages, and you create, format,
and manage them in much the same way. The key difference
is that WordPress automatically dates, orders, and groups
posts. WordPress also puts them on the home page and
assumes that people will want to read them from newest to
oldest. From WordPress’s point of view, posts are the lead
actors on your site, while pages are supporting characters.
But you’re not bound by that narrow definition of a site
How do your guests visit pages?
Like posts, every page gets a unique web address (URL), called a permalink.
.Of course, your readers aren’t likely to type in any URL other than the address for
your home page, so you need to provide links so visitors can get to your pages.
One way to do this is by putting links in posts and pages so you can connect them
together.
Links are a decent way to join related posts and pages, but they aren’t much help if
a guest wants to browse the pages on your site. That’s not a problem with posts—if
your visitors want to read posts, they can browse them easily on the home page,
starting with the most recent one and moving back in time. Or they can browse posts
in a specific category or with a specific tag (page 123). But WordPress doesn’t put
pages in chronological order, feature them on the home page, or give them category
or tag information. Visitors can find pages through a keyword search (by typing
something into the search box and then pressing the Enter key), because searches
scan the content in both posts and pages. But guessing at keywords is a clumsy
way to find a page, and it’s no substitute for a more convenient navigation system.
Fortunately, WordPress has several better, ready-made solutions to help visitors
find your pages:
• The Pages widget. Add this to your page, and visitors will always see a list of
all your pages, in the order you want. This widget works best if you want to
highlight all (or almost all) of your pages.
• An automatic menu. Many themes automatically put all your pages in a menu
on the home page. The only problem is that this auto-generated menu includes
every page in your site. If that results in an overly cluttered or disorganized
menu, you’ll prefer the next option.
• A custom menu. You pick the pages you want to showcase and arrange them
just so. You then display the menu somewhere prominent on your home page
(often where the automatic menu used to go). Most people take this route.
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