The difference between a “page” and a “post” is that pages contain information that does not change a lot, while posts are the pages that make up your blog and are run in sequence from newest to oldest on the front page of your site.
If you want to add some of the elements I mentioned in Step 11 (an “About” page for example) you will need to add them to “pages.” Then you will link these pages to menu items on your site.
So click on Pages/All Pages. You will see a list of all the pages you have created. Click on “Add New” as shown to add a new page.
The “Add New” screen appears and you can title your page. Title the page as you would want it to appear on the menu.
Then in the blank area below all the tool icons, you can type in the text of your page.
The toolbar shown has text editing tools and a list of styles (the ones that came with your theme) that you can pick from to apply to your text. If you don’t see the bottom row of tools as shown in the screen shot above, click the icon at the very far right of the top row. It is the “Toolbar Toggle” tool and it will let you display the bottom row of tools.
The other tools are probably pretty familiar to you and you can experiment to see what they do. The only other tool that might be unfamiliar is the one called “Insert Read More Tag.” This is probably more useful on posts (the toolbars are exactly the same for posts and pages). It lets you truncate your post so only a few lines show (hiding the rest of the post) and inserts an icon in your post that will show readers the rest of post when clicked. I haven’t used this yet, but I think I will start doing so soon.
You can always edit this page even after you publish it. But you can save it as a draft till you are ready to publish. The publish options are to the right of the page title entry field.
Unlike posts, if you publish a page, readers won’t actually be able to see it until you link to it some way, say through a menu navigation link.
But you can see there is a “Save Draft” button that lets you save as you work. Every save is saved as a revision and each revision can be accessed here:
The “Visibility” option lets you set who can see the page. “Public” means it can be seen by all readers. To set a page to be seen only by administrators and editors but not general readers or contributors, set it to “Private.” And finally there is an option to set a page visible to those who know and input a password.
The last option I will explain in this post (you can see two other options in the picture, but they aren’t important right now) is the Publish schedule. This again is more important for posts than pages, but you can choose to publish a page immediately or to schedule when the page will appear. For blog posts, this is the greatest tool ever. You can write, say, five blog posts in one day, and then schedule them to appear sequentially each of the following days. Generally, for pages, you would choose to publish immediately.
The last item to think about when adding a page is to decide where in the hierarchy of pages does it fit. It is important to have an organized hierarchy because Google looks for that. So you will probably put links across the top of your page to let users navigate to different areas of your site, like my top menu bar:
If you want an item to appear in this row of items, select “no parent.” If you want to the item to appear as a dropdown item from one of these top level items, then select it in the “Parent” box. You can use the “Order” box to set the order in which the sub-items will appear.
So when you have the page complete and ready to show the world, click “Publish.” And the new page should be accessible through the menu just as you set it up.
Leave a Reply