How To Create New Pages In WordPress

new pagesIn WordPress, you can write either posts or Pages. When you’re writing a regular blog entry, you write a post. Posts, in a default setup, appear in reverse chronological order on your blog’s home page. Pages are for content such as “About,” “Contact,” etc. Pages live outside of the normal blog chronology, and are often used to present timeless information about yourself or your site — information that is always applicable. You can use Pages to organize and manage any content.

In addition to the generally required “About” and “Contact” Pages, other examples of common pages include Copyright, Disclosure, Legal Information, Reprint Permissions, Company Information, and Accessibility Statement.

In general, Pages are very similar to Posts in that they both have Titles and Content and can use your WordPress Theme templates files to maintain a consistent look throughout your site. Pages, though, have several key distinctions that make them quite different from Posts.

Creating Pages

To create a new Page, log in to your WordPress installation with sufficient admin privileges to create new articles. Select the Administration > Pages > Add New option to begin writing a new Page.

The Pages Add New Screen allows you to add new Pages.

Title
The title of your page. You can use any words or phrases. Avoid using the same title twice as that will cause problems. You can use commas, apostrophes, quotes, hypens/dashes, and other typical symbols in the page like “About My Site – Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid.” WordPress will clean it up for the link to the page, called the slug.

Page Editing Area
The blank box where you enter your writing, links, links to images, and any information you want to display on your site. You can use either the Visual or the HTML view to compose your pages.

Preview button
Allows you to view the page before officially publishing it.

Publish box
Contains buttons that control the state of your page. The main states are Published, Pending Review, and Draft. A Published status means the page has been published on your blog for all to see. Pending Review means the draft is waiting for review by an editor prior to publication. Draft means the page has not been published and remains a draft for you. If you select a specific publish status and click the update page or Publish button, that status is applied to the page. For example, to save a page in the Pending Review status, select Pending Review from the Publish Status drop-down box, and click Save As Pending. (You will see all pages organized by status by going to Pages > Edit). To schedule a page for publication on a future time or date, click “Edit” in the Publish area next to the words “Publish immediately”. You can also change the publish date to a date in the past to back-date pages. Change the settings to the desired time and date. You must also hit the “Publish” button when you have completed the page to publish at the desired time and date.

Publish box
Visibility – This determines how your page appears to the world. Public pages will be visible by all website visitors once published. Password Protected pages are published to all, but visitors must know the password to view the page content. Private pages are visible only to you (and to other editors or admins within your site)

Permalink
After you save your page, the Permalink below the title shows the potential URL for the page, as long as you have permalinks enabled. (To enable permalinks, go to Settings > Permalinks.) The URL is generated from your title. In previous versions of WordPress, this was referred to as the “page-slug.” The commas, quotes, apostrophes, and other non-HTML favorable characters are changed and a dash is put between each word. If your title is “My Site – Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid”, it will be cleaned up to be “my-site-heres-lookin-at-you-kid” as the title. You can manually change this, maybe shortening it to “my-site-lookin-at-you-kid”.

Save
Allows you to save your page as a draft / pending review rather than immediately publishing it. To return to your drafts later, visit Pages > Edit in the menu bar, then select your page from the list.

Publish
Publishes your page on the site. You can edit the time when the page is published by clicking the Edit link above the Publish button and specifying the time you want the page to be published. By default, at the time the page is first auto-saved, that will be the date and time of the page within the database.

Parent
Parent page controls how deep your page hierarchy goes.

Template
Page Template to use for presenting this Page.

Order
Page order to sort the list of Pages

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