GBHXonline.com
Fully-Managed Website and Blog Hosting Solutions

This is a continuation of our The WordPress Author’s Checklist article.

Creating a New WordPress Page

Making a Page (something you won’t do very much) is pretty much the same as making a Post, but there are small differences, as follows:

• Do not allow comments (Discussion) on pages. Even if your theme allows it, we don’t think it’s a good practice and best avoided. Higher quality themes don’t even support page comments.
• Do edit the Post Slug to make it shorter and more concise. An example can be found on this site. Our contact page, has a default title of Contact Us, and if we let WordPress do its thing, the Post Slug would’ve been contact-us but we shortened it to just contact.
• Page Order is an option (with our system) so be sure to add a number. We usually set up page number in increments of 10 so you can easily add pages in between existing pages giving you more control. For example, our second link, “GBHXonline Services,” has a page order number of 10, whereas the Plans and Pricing page is 20.
• Most of our themes don’t support Pages with a Page Parent so leave this as is unless you know otherwise. Contact us or the maker of your theme if you have questions about this.
• The Default Page Template is used for all pages with exception to specialized pages such as the contact page and site map so leave this as is unless you know otherwise. Contact us or the maker of your theme if you have questions about this.
• As mentioned under the Post checklist above, you may specify certain Custom Fields such as description and keywords. You can and should do that with Pages too, but there is another Custom Field for Pages that you may want to use: newtitle (key). If you enter a newtitle, this is what will show up on the title bar on your browser when on that page (great for search engines) and the title will be more revealing to visitors. Doing it this way will keep your navigation page name short, and it won’t affect your Post Slug text. Example: Our contact page Post Slug is contact, our Navigation text (default title) is “Contact Us,” but our newtitle for that page is “Contact and Support Request Form.” The best of all worlds.

This should about cover it. Different versions of WordPress, different systems, and different themes may require a greater or lesser number of steps or other variations, but the information herein should still be valuable. Of course, if you have questions, please contact us.

Continuation Pages: 1 • 2 •

Filed under WordPress, Helpful Articles, SEO and SEM, Development on Apr 12th, 2008