Assuming a standard, default, installation of WordPress, there are two ways to create content for your website.
Posts Content
Posts are best know types of content for WordPress. Posts are designed to be displayed in chronological order. While this was originally designed for the traditional blog, it also works well for news sites, and anything else that will be posted over time.
To create a post, go to the posts menu on the left panel, and then choose the “Add New” option. This will take you to a new page within the WordPress admin center.
Here you will need to add a Title for your Post, pick a post Category, and then enter the main content. Additionally you may want to enter some tags, and specify the date/time of the posts.
Category
Categories are designed to organize content into specific areas. While you can select more than one category for your post, it is not recommended. Learn more about WordPress Categories here.
Tags
Tags are used to describe your content, to make it linkable between different related posts. However, unlike categories, you can easily have more than one, and it is normal to do so. This is because it organizes your posts by taxonomy, instead of categorically.
Publish Date/Time
Since posts are chronologically based, there is a definite need to define when posts are created. By default, the post time occurs when you hit the publish button. However, you can define a different publish date and time if you want.
This allows you to specify that it was published in the past, as well as scheduling the publish date/time in the future. For example, if you are working on a press release that you don’t want to go out until a certain time.
Draft/Schedule/Publish
You can save your posts as you create it. You will use the Save Draft button to do it.
If you have set the publish date/time in the future, you will see a Schedule button. It will release the post at the appropriate time.
Otherwise, you will see a Publish button, which will save the content and release it to the web. That way, anyone who visits your website will be able to see it immediately.
WordPress Pages
WordPress pages are designed to be static, and not viewed in sequential order. They can work well for an about page, contact page, or other content that will rarely change, and generally not need to be viewed in any type of order.
As such, they are simpler in many ways to set up.
They still have a title and content area to be filled out. However, they do not have categories or tags to organize them in any way. But you can set up a parent-child relationship with other pages to organize them.
You still have the ability to set a publish date, but this is more to allow you to withhold a page until it is appropriate to be released to the public.
You can also define a template. You will create a template as part of your theme, but can define it to do different things, so that you can behave differently than a normal page. In the old days you may have created a contact template, however, now a days you would just use a plugin. The plugin will usually tell you what you need to do.
Other Types of Content
I specify for the default WordPress install, because for the last several versions of WordPress, you can create your own types of content beyond the default two. These can be something that you create yourself, or that you get as part of a plugin and or a theme that you might install. (In the case of the theme, it must be your active theme, not just a theme.)
For our discussions, we will just look at the default types because with each other types, there is another way to handle it, and no way of knowing what that type would be as there could be thousands of types based upon what you need the content types to be.
We also did not look at media content, like images, as that is not usually linked to for a page directly, so we didn’t consider it relevant to this page.
WordPress: Writing Posts vs. Pages was originally found on Access 2 Learn
