Organizing Your Blog
Pages vs. Posts
To new WordPress users, the difference between pages and posts can be confusing. Pages refers to your web pages and Posts refers to your blog articles. You may only have pages on your web site, just posts, or sometimes both. The main distinction is how the blog articles are organized using Categories and Tags.
Categories & Tags
Before we dive into creating blog posts in our next tutorial, I thought it would be helpful to understand how to best organize your blog using categories and tags.
Categories and tags make it easier for readers to find information that is relevant to them. In describing categories and tags, it is helpful to think of a book analogy. The Categories represent the Chapters of a book and the Tags represent the Index.
When you are starting a new blog, it is important to brainstorm about the types of articles you plan to write and come up with no more than 10 or 12 categories that will represent all of your blog topics. Too many categories can make your blog difficult to navigate. You can always add a new category later, but it’s preferable to correctly set up your blog categories right from the start than it is to re-organize all of your blog articles at a later date.
Where your categories should be broad topic areas, your tags can be much more narrow in focus. Like the index in the back of a book, your tags represent sub-topics within the main category.
For example, a blog that is focused on Mechanical Engineering may choose to have 10 categories – one for each of the 9 Concentration Areas and a 10th category that is more general and relates to all Mechanical Engineering disciplines. An article within the Aeronautics Category may have tags for NASA, space flight, and trajectory analysis (depending upon the subject matter of the article.)
Note that WordPress uses this information to create additional pages on your web site, grouping related information together. So you end up with not only individual blog pages, but also pages for each of your categories and all of your tags. However, your theme must be set up with the appropriate templates in order to display these pages.
