Consider a simple, multi-page “online brochure” type of website. Of course there is the home page, and other standard pages round out the entire website. These pages almost certainly include an About Us page and a Contact Us page, and there may be one or two others that provide some details about the products and/or services of your firm. Such a website is considered static; nothing much ever changes on it, other than maybe the occasional edit when your business hours change or you tinker with the words on the Services page.
While functional, static websites do not invite themselves to be listed very high on Google or Bing’s search engine results. These online search tools reward website owners with higher rankings if, upon return visits to reindex the website, they find that there is added content. And if that new content begins to be accessed and read by an every-growing number of online searchers, then the website will almost inevitably move upward in search engine rankings. This is known as organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It’s the easiest, most straightforward, and often least-costly way of getting your website found and noticed more.
Most website owners have the resources and possible subject matter to develop added website content; articles, case studies, product profiles, and other short essays are often fairly easy for business owners and organization heads, or their employees or associates, to write. Unlike the foundational information that forms the foundation of a website, these added pieces of content are significantly more “dynamic” because they often highlight the recent or ongoing activities of your business or organization.
But you don’t want to have to come back to me every time you want to add some content to your website, do you?
With the WordPress platform’s roots being in the art of blogging, it is relatively easy for me to add functionality to your website that enables user-generated content to be easily posted to it. All you need to do is use a word processor to write your post, or perhaps fill out a predetermined form, to generate a new blog post, product announcement, event notification, or whatever. To summarize, you simply create some content, click a button, and that information will show up on your website!
Optionally, we might agree that your posts need to be categorized. Were that the case, different categories of posts could show up on different pages or in different sections of your website.
In setting up posting for your website, I will create one or more templates (formatted ways of displaying the information you’re posting) so that things look consistent. In fact, I can even make it so posts of differing categories are formatted and displayed differently. For example, a post categorized as an “upcoming event” would have a predetermined template used for it that showed the time, date, and location information in a uniform way in all upcoming event posts.
As well, I will create one or more archive pages.
An “archive page” — as used in WordPress lingo — is a terrible term. Nevertheless, it’s common to the WordPress vernacular so we must continue to use it! To me, the term “archive” denotes something that needs to be put away and only retrieved if absolutely necessary, like your personal tax receipts from five years ago. Instead, a “posts archive” is a preset way of displaying the synopses or abstracts of a group of related posts, meaning they’re typically from the same category. This concept is often a bit tough to visualize and understand, so I’ll use some examples to help you:
The Blog page on my website (which might be how you found the document you’re currently reading) is a very typical example of a post archive page. Each blog post’s most important information (title, featured image, excerpt) are shown on the page. Clicking on the archive listing takes the user to the actual written blog.
But an archive page could be, and often is, much simpler. It might be just a vertical list of post titles, with each title being a hyperlink. An archive page could also be used to simply display the only relevant and needed information from a post. For example, the provided screenshot below shows three of many archive listings for upcoming events and there is no need to click on one to find out more information — because all of the need-to-know information is shown on the archive.
In summary, whether your website is very complicated — like one for a realtor that lists for-sale properties with lots of information and photos in each listing — or you just want to have an Events / Announcements section on your website, having built-in posting will serve you well. It will not only organize and consistently display this dynamic information so that website visitors can easily find and read it, it’ll also potentially get you listed higher in search engine rankings.
