WordPress Question – stupid but I can’t figure it out

Question:

I’m using WordPress via my hosting company, iPage. I’ve never used it before and I’m having a stupid problem. I understand how to create new pages, but as a default, it gave me an “About” page and a “Home” page. The About page is in the list of pages, but the “Home” page is not, so unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to edit it. I created a new “Welcome” page to see if that would help, but now it’s just repeating everything that’s on the “Welcome” page onto the “Home” page. Please help before I rip my computer in half!!!!!

Answer:

This is not a stupid question.  Years ago when I first took a look at WordPress the same thing happened to me.  I got so frustrated with it that I uninstalled it and didn’t look at it again for over a year.  But time after time I kept hearing “you need to use WordPress”.  ”They” kept saying it was easy it is to set up.  It was easy it is to manage because you don’t have to mess around coding pages.  The entire blog will always have the same look due to something called themes.  And one of the best parts, the navigation happens by magic.  No more hand linking or creating menus. Ok, ok, ok.  I’ll have another look.  Maybe I was doing something wrong.

What’s Up With WordPress Pages?

I’ll tell you where your confusion is coming from, it’s those WordPress pages.  You see, all these years we’ve been building web PAGES so the first thing us pedestrians do when we attempt to use WordPress is go straight for the Pages and then when we view the blog from the browser, it’s not looking right.  Reason?  Because you should be doing your writing on Posts, not Pages.  Pages are meant to be static informational sections of the blog.

Example of WordPress Pages

• About
• Contact
• Terms of Service
• Disclosure
• Privacy Policy

You see the pattern?  They’re admin-type pages.  Depending on your theme, they can appear in menus, navigation bars, and footers.  However, you can build an entire blog with just pages.  I’ve done it myself.  It depends on how you want your blog to behave.  WordPress is extremely flexible.

Then What Are Posts?

Posts are for everything else and they are organized by categories.  Let’s say you want to have a blog about quilting.  Categories may be Finished Quilts, Quilting Patterns, Quilting Tips, Current News, etc.  When you make a new post you assign it to a category if the default category isn’t the right place for it.  Current News would be a good default category.

Let’s say there’s a fabric sale going on at a local store and you’re going.  When you get there, you’ll find quilts hanging on the wall.  You snap a couple of pics with your cell phone.  Then you find this awesome Batik fabric for 50% off.  You snap another pic.  When you get home you write is Post (not a Page) about your trip to the store and you include the pictures you took.  You leave it assigned to the Current News category.

Tomorrow you rummage through your quilting patterns trying to decide which quilt to make.  You write a post about it and ask for comments from your readers.

The next day you write another post and announce which pattern you chose and you begin cutting fabric.  More pictures.

Each day or so you make a new post documenting your quilting progress.

When the quilt is finished, you take another pic and write another post, but this time you assign it to the category Finished Quilts.

How It All Comes Together

So, how do all these posts appear on your blog?  By default (that means you didn’t alter normal WordPress behavior) they appear on your Home page.  The home page is actually a page, a container if you will, that has a specific function.  That function is to display posts.  The most recent posts will display first.  Even though you assigned some posts to different categories, they still appear on the home page.

Your blog’s sidebar may display several widgets like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Recent Pages, Categories.   The Categories widget will have counts next to each category.  It would look something like this.

Categories

• Current News (8)
• Quilting Patterns (2)
• Quilting Tips (12)
• Finished Quilts (1)

So if people don’t want to scroll through all of your posts on the home page to find which quilts you’ve made, they can just click on the Finished Quilts category and see all the posts that were assigned to that category.

Ok, so let’s go back to the home page.  By default it display 10 of the most recent posts and it displays the entire post.  But because you have so many pictures, you decide it’s taking too long to load so you set it to only display a few sentences from each post.  That way you only get post titles and a few lines of the post.  In order to read the entire post, you have to click on the post title or the link that says something like “read more…”.  When you click on it and it takes you to another page.  Yes, it’s a page, another container, and that page has a specific function, too.  It displays the single post you clicked on.  No other posts are on it.  Only the one you clicked on.

How To Fix Your Blog

The first thing I do when I install WordPress is delete the default stuff it created.

• Go into Posts: All Posts:  Delete the Hello Word post.  When  you delete that post, the comment on that post will also be deleted, killing 2 birds with 1 stone.
• Go into Posts: Categories: Rename the Uncategorized category to something meaningful like Current News, What’s Shakin’, Daily Events, etc.
• Go into Pages: All Pages: Delete the About page if you don’t want one, or rewrite it to talk about yourself.  Post a pic of your mug if you like.
• Go to Links: All Links:  Delete them all.

Ok, now you pretty much have a clean slate and you can create a few test posts you can see how your blog is organized.  Make a Test Post 1, type a few things and publish it.  Do test post 2 and 3, too.  Now look at your blog in a browser.  You will see, in this order, Test Post 3, Test Post 2, Test Post 1.  You see?  The most recent post displays first.  You can alter that behavior, but that’s a whole other subject.  Now delete those test posts and write your first real post.

Happy Blogging!

BTW, iPage is a great web host for WordPress.  Hope you took advantage of the incredible sale they’re having right now.  Plans as low as $2.95/month.