Blogging – Pages and Posts

Pages and Posts

What’s the difference between a website page and a post?

If you’re new to websites you might be wondering what’s the big deal behind Pages and Posts. At first glance they appear to be one and the same. And if you were to create either a new page or a new post you’d be presented with almost identical layouts. In a lot of cases the appearance of pages and posts will look the same to your website reader.

But don’t let this fool you, because there is a fundamental difference between the two. And it’s that difference that makes content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, great platforms for integrating a personal or business blog on a traditional website.

Pages

Let’s think about the types of elements that make up a typical website. More often than not you’ll see pages like About Us, Services, Contact Us, etc. Within your website’s theme or template, these are classed as Pages. It doesn’t matter when they were created, published or updated, they just form part of the overall website construction. And the date is was published, the ‘timestamp’, is irrelevant. For example, when you visit the About Us page of your favourite website you don’t expect the content to have changed from what was there a week ago or one year ago.

Posts

But now, take a minute to think of your favourite news website. A news site is the perfect example of when you’d expect content to be different from the last time you visited the site. After all, news wouldn’t be ‘news’ if it wasn’t current and regularly updated. So, in the case of news sites, Posts are most often used to write regular articles about different topics and they will also be categorised under one or more headings.

When you publish a post within WordPress it knows to treat the post differently to publishing a page. So when you set up a blog, it will list all of your published posts in reverse chronological order on your Blog page. That way your latest update will always display first. Since posts are listed with the newest posts at the top, your posts are meant to be timely. Your older posts are archived based on month and year. So as the posts get older, your visitors will have to trawl your website in order to find them. That’s why it’s a good idea to organise your posts based on categories and tags.

Summary

To summarise, your website can contain both pages and posts. If done well using pages and posts in this way can help you build a more engaging user experience for your site visitors. In fact, another reason to maintain a regular posting schedule is because blog posts help to keep your website active.  So that’s great for improving SEO.

Regular posts and updates also help to keep your subscribers happy. After all, your followers signed up to receive regular, relevant and interesting updates from you. So don’t let them down!