WordPress: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Chapter 8: Creating Pages and Menus

In previous chapters, you focused most of your attention on WordPress posts—the blocks of dated, categorized content at the heart of most WordPress blogs. But WordPress has another, complementary way to showcase content, called pages.

Like posts, pages are built out of blocks and styled by your theme. Unlike posts, pages aren't dated, categorized, or tagged. One way to understand the role of WordPress pages is to think of them as ordinary web pages, like the kind you might compose in an HTML editor.

In this chapter, you'll learn to use pages to supplement your blog. Then you'll learn to manage page navigation with menus, so your visitors can find the content they want. After that, you'll use pages to build a custom home page that replaces the standard WordPress list of posts. You'll even see how you can build an entire site out of pages, with no posts required.

Understanding Page Basics

You're likely to use pages for two reasons. First, even in a traditional blog, you may want to keep some content around permanently, rather than throw it into your ever-advancing sequence of posts. For example, let's say you make a personal blog and want to include a page called About Me with biographical information. It doesn't make sense to tie this page to a specific date, like a post. Instead, you want it to be easily accessible all the time, as a page. Similarly, if you're making a WordPress site for a business, you might use a page to provide contact ...