Guide to WordPress – part 6 – Adding your First Page

If you’ve been reading along then you’ll know what I see as the main differences between posts or pages. This article is going introduce you to “creating pages in WordPress”, which is almost the same as adding a post with the main difference being the way it controls the order or the hierarchy, which is controlled by creating parent or child subpages rather than categories and tags.

WordPress Says:

• Pages are for content that is less time-dependent than Posts.
• Pages can be organized into pages and subpages.
• Pages can use different Page Templates which can include Template Files, Template Tags and other PHP code.
• Pages may have a more complex array of readily available display adjustments when using sophisticated Themes with extensive customization.
• In essence, Pages are for non-blog content. It is possible to remove all or most Posts from a WordPress installation, and thus to create a standard non-blog website.

Let’s take a look at the Add New Page… Page!

You have two choices, use the main menu on the left (Pages/Add New) or the toolbar at the top of your browser (+New/Page).

If you’re following along; in the introduction to the dashboard article, I’ve spoke about the Screen Options and how to customise each of the pages your using to your needs. You can also apply that here.

Let’s take a look at what you’re seeing.

1. Enter title here – This is where you’ll enter the page title. Think logically for this. What I mean by think logically is: place key words relevant to the page itself in your titles as this will also be used for the page URL (the address in the browser). So if you title your page “Your First Page”, it would look like this: http://my-website.co.uk/your-first-page. WordPress translates this to a hyphenated (-), lower-case version used for the URL. So making your titles more relevant to the actual content only has positive results and is more likely to push the content up in search results. It makes your site more Google-friendly.
2. Add Media * – Click once and a popup window will ask you to insert an image. Drag your image to this window directly from your computer then add-it to the post.
3. The WYSIWYG Editor * – What You See Is What You Get editor. Use this area to add the body/content to your page. If you’ve used MS Word or any email client then this will look quite familiar.
4. Visual – Otherwise known as the WYSIWYG editor, in this section what you add will mostly reflect what you’ll see on the finished page, from a user’s point of view.
   Text – This is your page in its raw HTML. You should really be sticking to the Visual Editor. Otherwise your post will look quite flat once published.
5. Publish * – Save Draft, Publish, Preview, Private. All the page’s visibility options are located in this area. Toggle each section by clicking on the blue Edit links.
6. Page Attributes – This is the main visual difference when editing a post and a page. Page Attributes are used by pages to give them a particular look (Template) and hierarchy (Parent) amongst its parent/child/sibling pages.
   1. Parent – If you haven’t created a page then this will show (no parent). Once a page has been created they’ll show up in this menu. You’ll then have the option of changing the way that the pages are stacked in your site by giving it a parent page or making it a child of a parent page.
      Think of the Parent dropdown as the index of a manual – a clear page hierarchy.
   2. Template – This depends on your theme, but for most you should have at least two options: Full Page and Right Sidebar. This is a basic description of what kind of template this page will use to display the content.

   * These are covered in more detail in part 4 and part 5 of this series.

Organising your pages

Just as you can have subcategories within your Categories, you can also have subpages within your Pages, creating a hierarchy of pages.

Featured in this series:

1. Guide to WordPress – part 1.  What is WordPress
2. Guide to WordPress – part 2. Introducing the Dashboard
3. Guide to WordPress – part 3. Pages or Posts
4. Guide to WordPress – part 4. Adding your First Post
5. Guide to WordPress – part 5. Media/Comments/Plugins
6. Guide to WordPress – part 6. Adding your First Page