WordPress, how shall I construe thee?
A WordPress website, it has both ‘pages’ and ‘posts’ – two fundamental structural options for presenting web pages, a choice often agonized over by novice webmasters. Even though WordPress offers both, it takes a while to get one’s brain around if – or how – to use both on a website.
Why do you care?
As a thinking Internet citizen (even if you’re just here thinking “what is this crap?”) it helps understand the incongruities of most websites, and why their layouts are so hard to grasp. Hence their content so hard to find.
While pages and posts are indistinguishable to a site visitor, WordPress treats them differently to provide website creators the best of both worlds – both a static website and a blog, all in one. Either, or both.
Pages are static things, and like conventional, simple websites as originally conceived, are arranged in a tree of subjects as you would visualize chapters and sub-chapters of a book. Hierarchical.
The top horizontal menu at SheepOverboard lists the top-level pages, and all related pages live below their respective home pages. When on a page, at any level, at right under Contents you will find a collapsing tree that shows where you are. That tree is clickable.
The page tree doesn’t have to be hierarchical, but in practice menu design has shown more than 10 items of choice starts to overwhelm readers, so menus and sub-menus are the best choice.
Posts are best understood as an endless string of sequential (time-stamped) pages, but called posts because they’re .. well, because, and typical of blogs, as in blogging. Like a diary. Since they become unwieldy after a few dozen or so, they are best categorized – either or both by topic (“filed under”) or year/month/day.
There’s nothing much more to consider. SheepOverboard’s “Passing Parade” is the blog section of the site. Its home is a real page, thereafter it points to posts (skip that if your head aches).
Oh, and the editorials are just posts – among all the others, which are essentially topical essays – but filed under editorials, of course.
