Pages, Posts, and Menu Items
Hi! I just wanted to share something with you that I learned somewhere along the way but wasn't taught in our beginning lessons here and maybe should be.
The only time you should create a page is when you want to have content show up as a menu item, such as your About Me and Privacy Policy pages. The majority of your content should be in your posts, and you should create a category for each post.
For most of your menu items, you will want to create Custom Links. These are menu items that will either simply exist as drop down menus or will link to a page (that you will actually not even need to create because it will create itself) that contains all of the posts you write that have the same category.
To create Custom Links in your menu that will simply be drop down items in your menu, first you will need to go to your Dashboard. Then click on Appearance and then on Menus. To the left of the Menu Structure, look for where it says Custom Links and click that. Where it says URL, type #. And for Link Text, type whatever you want the drop down menu title to say.
To create a Custom Link that links to all the posts of a specific category, you will again click on Custom Links, but this time where it says URL, you will type http://thenameofyourwebsite.com/category/the-name-of-the-category. (Make sure you actually put - in between all the words if the category is more than one word.) For Link Text, type the name of the category. This will then be a menu item that links to all the posts of that category.
Recent Comments
11
Thank you Donna, shall act according to the info you have provided.
You get yourself a follower.
Best Regards
Monty
Your very welcome. I'm glad to hear that :) I also just came across another blog on here that suggested a great plug-in I use that makes it easy to change a post into a page and vice versa. The plug-in is Post Type Switcher. I use to just cut and paste but I didn't want to lose my comments. So that's a great plug-in to have.
good info. I am NOT doing it that way but maybe I should. my pages are things that are static... Including reviews... But maybe reviews should be a post category...
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I am so lost. I think I am going to have to read this a few times before I understand it!
I feel like the pages I created were pointless then?
I just want my posts to be added to the pages that I have made.
If anyone knows how to break it down even further (as annoying as that may sound) I would really appreciate it.
You need the pages, so it's good that you created them. Leave your website URL here and I'd be happy to take a look. Or take a peek at mine, BackpackingRuffian.com and check out the menu. Every tab you see I created as a "page"
The posts you create should fill your wall, called a Blog Roll. These are posts that anyone who visits your website can scroll through, starting from the most recent and going backwards.
Do you have a search bar in your widget area? This will be useful once you have more content. Anyone visiting your website can "search" a specific topic or category -- this is why you want to categorize your posts. Make more sense?
It's a lot to wrap your head around when you first start.. I'm not very far along myself - a learning process!