WordPress 24-Hour Trainer. Plumley George

      But with great power comes great responsibility. You're the one who has to create a useful and easy-to-follow navigation system for your users; WordPress cannot do that for you. It just makes it easy for you to do the creating. The more you can understand what's possible with WordPress, the better you'll become at making use of its powerful tools to create the best website for your visitors.

      Understanding the difference between two ways of handling content in WordPress is particularly important to making your site easier for you to use and more useful to your visitors, and that is the difference between posts and pages.

      Posts and pages share a lot of similarities, in particular the way their user interfaces or, in WordPress terminology, their admin screens work (which means there are many functions you'll have to learn only once). Where they differ brings you to the heart of the principle in this lesson: Store everything in the smallest possible pieces.

      Take testimonials. For many websites it is absolutely crucial to have testimonials from satisfied customers or clients. So you grab those e-mails and letters people have written praising your services and you open up WordPress. You want a web page of all those testimonials, so under Pages in the WordPress menu, you select New Page. The WYSIWYG editor makes it easy to copy the text over from your e-mail or Word document, add any extra formatting, and get the page looking nice indeed.

      Fast forward 6 months, and you decide that you would like to group some of the testimonials onto another web page because they all relate to a particular service. Not so bad; you just copy the text of the page, create a new WordPress page, paste it in, and then delete the testimonials you don't need. Then a month later you get a new testimonial that belongs on both pages. You copy and paste into both. But suppose you have several categories of testimonials; you can see how this could get both tedious and complex to manage.

      Remember earlier in this lesson the diagram of the testimonials page (refer to Figure 1.2) and how you might break it up instead into individual testimonials? Well that's what posts in WordPress are for: groups of related content that you can categorize. That's all we mean when we talk about a blog: groups of similar content. So now, instead of putting all the testimonials in a WordPress page, you can create a category of posts called Testimonials and enter individual testimonials as posts, assigning them to that category. Then put the category on your site menu, and when visitors click that link, WordPress gathers all the relevant posts and outputs them as a single web page.

      Fast forward 6 months again and you decide you need a category of testimonials for a particular service. Just create a subcategory of Testimonials called, say, Workshop Testimonials. Through an easy WordPress interface, you can assign 2, 20, or 200 testimonials to that new category with a single click. Then you just put the Workshop Testimonials on your menu or create a link to the category wherever you want. When visitors click, they see only testimonials about your workshop.

      By keeping those testimonials individual, the possibilities are endless. Need rotating testimonials on the front page? Want to feature a particular testimonial on the sidebar of a specific page? It's only possible by keeping them as separate posts. That's the power of thinking like WordPress. In the next lesson you start applying that thinking to a sample site, and throughout this book you see ways to use WordPress's tools to increase the power and flexibility of your site.

      Try It

      There isn't anything specific to try based on the material in this lesson, but one thing you can do is examine your favorite news website, and in the content area of the site, try to image how those pieces of content might be separated in the site's CMS. Then go to another page, compare what's common with the previous page, and try to imagine how the builders have divided up the structure of the page – map it out on paper.

      Lesson 2

      Planning Your Site for WordPress

      It's beyond the scope of this lesson to go into the entire planning process for a website. Rather, the goal is to map out a website and plan generally how to implement it in WordPress.

      If you're setting up a personal blog, WordPress has done much of the structuring for you, and you could skip to the next lesson, but there's still plenty here that can be of use. For everyone else, this is an important step because with the right kind of planning upfront, not only can you save a lot of time and energy in the future, but it also can help you think about ways to make your website even more useful and easier to navigate.

      To build a site in WordPress, you have three key things to consider during the planning process:

      The main focus in this lesson is on the first item – the content – because people have the hardest time with it.

      The site used as an example throughout the book is for a company called Island Travel, a small travel agency with two locations, specializing in vacations to the Caribbean. Its primary goal is to have a website that provides a personal touch, with information largely written by its staff, and of course, the company wants it to be as easy as possible to update and expand.

      Mapping Out Your Site Content

      There are two kinds of maps you'll create for the travel site: a site map and a page map. The first will show every page on the website, and you want them organized. The second is an outline of elements that you want to appear on every page of the site: header, footer, and sidebar, at the end of every article/blog post, or wherever. In either case, “map” can be a bit intimidating, so you'll begin each one with a list.

      The Site Map

      For your site map, start writing a list of pages you think you might need, or more to the point, pages you think your visitors will want. Don't worry whether you've thought of everything – that will never happen – just write things down as you think of them. Don't do it in one sitting; come back the next day, and the next, and so on.

      Here's a list for Island Travel: