A picture of a WordPress post in the dashboard.

WordPress Posts Defined

WordPress content comes in two basic flavors:  posts and pages. This article is the first in a series of three that define WordPress posts, pages, and discuss the differences between the two.

What’s a WordPress Post?

A picture of a WordPress post in the dashboard.

You can use posts to publish news, product reviews, or pictures of your cat.

Posts have their roots in the annals of blogging history.  Early bloggers kept online journals that they updated daily, weekly, or when they photographed their cat. Though blogging has grown from its humble roots it hasn’t forgotten where it came from.  Individual, time-sensitive posts (and cat pictures) are still the fundamental currency of the blogging world.

Authors use WordPress Posts to make regular entries to your site. They can contain all sorts of information like current news, site updates, videos, and images. The date and time in which the author submits a post often provides some context to the post’s content.

WordPress Posts are:

  • Created often. Posts are written regularly and are the primary unit of content on your blog. As your blog matures your site will accumulate many, many posts.
  • Rarely changed As a general guideline the date and time in which a post was published provides some context to the post’s content. If your site publishes technology news you would not change your entry about the iPhone 4 just because the iPhone 5 is released. However if you post content that is found to be inaccurate, there’s nothing wrong with editing to correct it.
  • Categorized. As your site matures it will accumulate a huge number of posts.  Categorizing your WordPress posts benefits the author as well as the reader to find the content they desire.
  • Time-sensitive. This is more of a guideline than a rule, but WordPress posts are often related to the date they were published.

Some examples of content that you might include in WordPress posts:

  • News articles
  • Online diary entries
  • Product reviews
  • Photos and videos
  • How-to articles

 

1 reply

Comments are closed.