As chapters and pages help you navigate a book quite easily, so are pages, posts and categories to a WordPress-powered blog or website. In fact, pages, posts and categories are the building blocks. So, everything falls in place once you understand and can use them properly.
Pages
A page is what you see on your screen anytime you access your blog. The first page is usually the ‘Home Page. This page welcomes visitors to your blog because it summarises all the contents in your blog/website. The second page is the ‘About Page’, which briefly describes your blog or website while your contact page tells visitors to your blog or website how you can be contacted. Most times, they come as forms. These pages all have similar headers and the same information on the narrow left and right columns of your blog.
The beauty of WordPress is that it gives you freedom to create and add more pages. For example, you can create a page that talks about your service/product offerings, and another that talks about your partners and affiliates, among others.
Why do you need to know this?
Because when you choose a theme, it is important to know whether all your pages will look alike. In most themes, that is the way it is, and if you ask your web designer to make changes, you are asking a lot. It is perfectly fine for all your pages to be set up the same way. In fact, it makes things easier for your readers. If you want your pages to be laid out differently from one another (or differently from your basic theme), you will either find a theme that makes changes easy (there is more all the time) or plan to spend time and money.
Short story: Don’t try to change your page layout
Posts
Posts, which are also called blog posts, are the articles you publish in your blog or website. They can be formatted in bold type, italics or bullet points, and can also include links, photographs, MP 3 and video clips. Your posts appear on your home page or on any other page as you may desire. Because your blog posts are central to your blog or website content, you must think about how they will look or be placed when choosing a theme.
“The way the posts show up on the page is part of the page layout. As earlier said, don’t try to change the page layout. A few themes have built-in flexibility that allows you to change the way your posts appear. However, the important thing to remember is when you choose a theme, you want to understand how it displays posts.
Categories
Categories are created and assigned by you to help organise your posts. In fact, some categories can have sub-categories. For example, you may have one category for your articles on mobile apps and another for articles on mobile devices so that anytime you open a category; all the articles relating to a particular subject are found therein. A category works the same way your office filing system works. In short, your categories make searching articles on your blog a lot easier for your readers.