Transcript:
In this video, we're going to take a look at the concept of pages in WordPress and this is where your
content's really gonna start to come together. Right now what we have is basically a blog, which is
an archive page, with some posts but once we get pages then we start to build out a website. Now a
page is different from a post in that pages aren't really tied to a point in time. A journal entry
is for a specific day or a specific time, a page is just there.
Now one of the first things we're going to do is build a home page and then move this news to a news
page. Let's take a look at how to do that.
Here in the admin area on the left, there's a pages section. It comes with a sample page which we're
not going to use so I'm simply going to click trash.
So now let's click Add. We'll make a home page and I'm simply going to save it and come back to it
later. We know we want two pages at least, home and news, and there we are.
Now we have two pages and here on the page's admin archive we can do things very similar to our
posts: edit, quick edit, trash and view. We can see the author, we can see how many comments there
are and when it was published but WordPress has a special way of making this the home page and this
the news page.
We're going to go under settings, reading and radio. You can choose front page displays, a static
page and the Post's Page is news. We'll save changes and there we are.
Now, when we reload the homepage, we get that and if we could have "/news" we get our archive. Now,
you may recall that we didn't put anything on the news page and indeed we cannot. Once we set that
page as the news archive, the blog takes it over and it doesn't matter what we put on that page.
Now we have this home page and we need to decide what to put on it so let's go back to our pages.
Here you can see that this is the front page and this is the posts page. So now I'm going to edit
the home page and we'll put some content on it. I'm going to put a picture at the top of our city.
This is the media library and we're going to go over it in much greater detail in another video but
for now you'll be able to see that we can upload files and give them a name we're going put in some
alt text. We'll put in full size and insert into page and there we are. Now we have a picture and
now let's get some text to put on there...and now we have some text.
If we click update and then reload, you can see this beautiful cityscape and some text. Now part of
the text here is that you can visit the aquarium, the zoo and the museum so let's make some pages
for those. Again, I'm just going to hit publish rather than putting in content right now because we
can go back and put in content whenever we wish. Now note that's similar to posts. You have a
permalink right here and it's based off the title so now let's go back to the home page and we'll
edit.
Now let's highlight aquarium and click the link here. We'll go to link options and choose the
aquarium page and there we are. I'm going to do the same for zoo and the same for the museum. Now
you can see why it's handy to have all the pages built out even if there's no content on them yet
because as you pour content into them you can be linked into the other pages. We'll click update and
reload.
Now we can click on aquarium and there's our aquarium page. We could fill this page with pictures
and text about our aquarium and the same goes for the zoo and for the museum.
Now I pointed this out a few minutes ago, but take a close look at the URL. It's very short and very
easy to understand. Anyone could look at this and realise that they're looking at the museum page.
People love that and Google loves that. So try to keep your page titles short and sweet and
descriptive.
Let's take one more look at some of the features of pages. They're actually a fair bit simpler than
posts. They have far fewer options, under screen options, fewer columns and fewer things you can do
to this archive but they also have some things that posts cannot do. For example, you can have page
templates, you can have archives, a page blog and a page showcase. We'll take a look at those in
another video, but they format your content a little bit differently. They can also have order so
that you can numerically order them so you have a number one page, a number two page, etc. Some
themes use this for navigation but others do not, so be sure to check your theme and see if it's
needed.
Similar to posts we can have custom fields, discussion, comments, slug and author and those work
exactly like posts that we covered in the earlier video. Aside from that, pages are really quite
simple. They're not intended to be great, big complex things and yet you can put plenty of
information on there. You can put photos, texts, links and video, and all of that just like a post.
By the time we're done building our word ville site, we'll have a complete set of filled out pages.