Today, class, we are going to discuss Pages versus Posts.

This is a Post. A blog post. Pretty much all of WordPress is blog posts, as WordPress is blogging software and a blog host. Your posts go in chronological order from oldest (at the bottom of the page) to freshest, and if you're using a template there's fuckall you can do about the way they're displayed.

But.

There are other things, called Pages. These aren't streamed the way blog posts are; they just sit there in cyberspace all by themselves, totally separate from the blog posts, although joined by a link in the sidebar. If you go to the sidebar, you'll see you have a link for Pages, and right now this thing just has some boilerplate text from WordPress in it. Click on it and check it out. It says:

About

This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.

which is, indeed, true. Pages are like separate pages on a website, as opposed to blog posts that are all strung together. You can, if you want to get advanced, nest Pages inside Pages, but that's a lesson for another time. We're blogging here, not building websites. Different.

You should use a Page rather than a Post for anything permanently relevant, anything you want people to be able to access from anyplace in your blog. Examples would be an "About Me" or bio page, "My goals and aspirations" for an inspirational journal, "Books that guide my life" or, as I have, "Terrorist Alert Levels." Whatever goes in a Page should be something that isn't time-dependent, as it'll be displayed with equal importance as long as your blog exists.

You write a Page just the way you write a Post. When you click New Post or Write you get to a writing page; at the top you'll see two tabs, Write Post and Write Page. Write Post is the default, but if you click Write Page you will write a page and it will get listed under Pages on your sidebar. All the functions for writing Pages are exactly the same as for writing Posts, so you've got everything you need to just go for it.

If you find you've totally fucked up, you can always go back to Edit and click Delete Page, which you have to scroll down to see, but it is there. Right now, I suggest you go to the boilerplate (prefab) Page, click Edit, and replace that text with something of your own. And while you're at it, do the same with the first, boilerplate Post that WordPress stuck in your blog, unless you've already edited it to something useful. Think of it like hanging pictures in a new apartment; it won't really look like your place until you're done.