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

What Pages Are:

• Pages are for content that is less time-dependent than Posts.
• Pages can be organized into pages and SubPages.

What Pages are Not:

• Pages are not Posts, nor are they excerpted from larger works of fiction. They do not cycle through your blog’s main page.
• Pages cannot be associated with Categories and cannot be assigned Tags. The organizational structure for Pages comes only from their hierarchical interrelationships, and not from Tags or Categories.
• Pages are not files. They are stored in your database just like Posts are.

Login Screen for WordPress

1. Login

You will need a user account on this site and at least “contributor” status.
» More Information on user roles

2. Create a New Page

   • Navigate to the dashboard (http://hoorwa.org/wp-admin/)
   • Click Pages » Add New

Now we have a blank slate and before we proceed we need a little introduction to how the site works. Therefore, allow me to introduce you to the page layout of the site.

The site is structured so that it has 8 main pages and all other content should be added with one of those pages as the “parent” page. You can think of the page structure like a family tree. The root is hoorwa.org. The 8 main child pages are the same that appear in the image menu on the site: The River, Events, Recreation, etc. All other pages on the site are sub pages of these 8 pages (or other sub pages). You can view the full page list by creating a new page and clicking on the drop-down on the right of the screen under Attributes/Parent.
» More on subpages

Note: You might notice that there are three other “main pages” labeled
- “Documentation” (this information),
- “Newsletters” (special page that should just be a list of links to the latest newsletters. More information about that under Special Pages)
- and “Test Page” (A page I just use to test the layout of the site).
We consider these pages “special pages”.
» More information on Special Pages



Page editor in Visual Mode

3. Edit page Attributes

   • Parent

   This attribute is relevant, and arguably the most important, because it determines how a visitor to the site will find your page. You may have noticed that whenever you click a category from the image-menu you are directed to a page with a smaller menu. From that menu you can move within the subcategory by mousing-over the desired page name. Any page you create is accessible through this dynamic menu navigation system or via a search query (from the site search bar). The sequence of pages to mouse-over in the menu corresponds to the path through the tree you take to the page. This menu is created automatically on each page. So think for a few seconds about the most intuitive place to feature your content.

   • Order

   This defines the order in which sibling pages are featured. All pages default to 0 and when two pages are tied, the pages are sorted alphabetically. You should not need to worry about this category unless you are creating a multi-page guide or adding pages to the Events category (Which should obviously be ordered by date).

   Lowest is first – Highest is last

   • Custom Fields

   If you really know what you’re doing and know some CSS then you can add custom fields to the page to alter the “theme” of the page. This is things like text color, borders, background, and whatnot. I would not recommend using these fields.

   • Discussion

   This determines whether visitors are allowed to leave comments at the bottom of the page or not. Generally you do not want comments on content pages but you might want to allow people to leave comments on an upcoming event about how much they enjoyed it last year or maybe if they have some information on the event that was not included in the page.

   • Publish Bar
     • Preview – duh
     • Status – Whether the page is published or not
     • Visibility – who can see the page
     • Date – You can even change the date on which the page is published if you want to (sneaky).
     • Publish – Actually makes this a page on the site. Otherwise it stays as a draft. You should never publish until the content is completely finished and well formatted (use preview).

     Last, you’ll notice on the right the “Publish” bar which has options such as

There are several attributes that we can edit for your pages. Most are intuitive but I will cover the main ones:

4. Add Content

This is the easy part. There are two ways to add content. You can either add it as HTML (which really doesn’t require you to know any HTML at all, just click the buttons) or Visually (this is similar to your favorite word processor). For more information on how the visual editor gets converted to HTML, browse this documentation.

Important Note: When you copy and paste text from Microsoft Word into the visual editor it saves all of Microsoft’s weird, weird formatting. It’s really messed up. Now normally this would be fine, though it takes up a ton of space (see Example). In Firefox, Chrome, and Safari (the three main browsers that follow internet standards). Everything still displays fine and it’s easy as pie. HOWEVER, in Internet Explorer (Microsoft’s browser), the company has it’s own rules for how to code content that are just a tiny bit different from the industry standard. The consequence: Microsoft Word code BREAKS their browser…. I know, really messed up….

The Fix:


- When you copy and paste, paste into the “HTML” editor on the site.

- THEN switch to visual mode and format the content the way you would like it.

That’s it! (It takes a little bit more time, I know, but I would suggest writing your content on the site rather than in Word anyways. And the only tech team that has the time and resources to deal with it is Google for GMail and such.)

Media: It is common for you to need to add media to your page. Whether this content is image, audio, or video based, it is a piece of cake to add to your page neatly. You can even add captions. More on the details of doing this in the Manipulating Media Page.

When you want to put images on the site you need to upload them to the site (you can’t host them on your local computer). This is a product of you copy and pasting from Microsoft again. When you want to upload images, you need to select the Add Image button. Upload the image as described by the media documentation. If you don’t do this, you will be able to see the images fine (because the browser can access your files) but anyone else that looks at the site won’t see them.
- The URL for the image should look like this: http://hoorwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/valley2.jpg
- Not like this: file:///C:/DOCUME~1/Owner/LOCALS~1/Temp/moz-screenshot-1.jpg
In the second one, the image is being looked for on your file system and not on the site.

5. Click Publish

That’s it, you know all you need to update content on your site.

Note – You can edit any page on the site the same way by selecting Edit instead of Add New from the Pages menu on the left side of the Dashboard.