4. Writing & managing pages
Meg’s PressG! objectives
- To create and save a page for your blog.
Your PressGO! objectives
What are you hoping to learn from this module? Your objectives can be the same as mine, but is there anything else you are expecting to learn? Write down your thoughts, discuss with a partner or small group in the class, or blog it!
Introduction
A common thing you might want to do as an educator using WordPress is to make pages. Your blog itself gets continually updated, but pages are ’static’ in that they do not record the ‘latest’ information (i.e., your posts). Pages are especially useful if you are using WordPress as a class or learning management system (where you create modules with your course content — such as I’m doing here with PressGO!), or if you are asking students to use a blog as an e-learning portfolio where they have a homepage, a CV, and examples of their work (pretty much as I’ve done at MeganPoore.com). In this module you will learn:
- Page basics.
- How to write and save your page.
Focus questions: Why use static pages?
What would be the advantages of having static pages on your blog? When might they come in handy? When might they be over-used? Write down your thoughts, discuss with a partner or small group in the class, or blog it!
Page basics
Unlike posts, pages are not tagged, categorised, archived or presented in reverse order. A page usually contains static information and simply sits at the side of your site ready for visitors to look at whenever they want. All of my PressGO! modules are made as static pages because the content will remain pretty fixed over time (although I can still change it, add to it, improve it as I want). Blog posts, on the other hand, are meant to be dynamic — they’re entries where you share information, observations, opinions, resources, etc.
Exercise: Write a page
- Go to Write > Page on your blog’s admin dashboard to bring up the options for writing your page.
- Choose a title for your page. Type it in.
- Use the visual editor (which is the default setting) to write your page and to give you an idea of how your post will look when you publish it.
Saving and publishing your page
Make sure you save your page every now and then. Click on ‘Save’ to do this. When you are ready to send your page to your blog for your audience to read, click on ‘Publish.’ If you want to save your page and do something else before you publish it, click on ‘Save.’ Your page will be saved in your Manage > Pages menu for you to work on later.
To retreive a saved page, go to Manage > Pages. Click on the title for the page you want to retrieve.
Exercise: Save your page
- To save your page but to continue to write, click on ‘Save’.
- If you want to save your page and do something else before you publish it, click on ‘Save’ and move on to the next thing you want to do. Your post will be saved in your Manage > Pages area for you to work on later.
- To retreive a saved post, go to Manage > Pages and click on the title for the page you want to make changes to.
Exercise: Publish your page
You can always delete it later.
- Click on ‘Publish’.
- Your page has now been saved and sent to your blog on the Web. However, it will not be viewable to your audience until you activate your page widget. More on that in a later module.
Reflection
Write down your thoughts, discuss with a partner or small group in the class, or blog it!
- What have I learnt?
- What is still unclear?
- What do I need to follow up on?
- Where to from here?
- What other stuff I have read or accessed to help me make sense of it all?
