When to use a page and when to use a category? What’s the difference anyway?
Say you want to show your events. You’d like to update them on a regular basis. You have a few options, here are two of them.
Page
A page is a single area of content. You can do whatever you’d like in there.
A page is just that: it’s a single page. You can design it how you like (add columns, photos, headings, etc.). You could add your events in a bulleted list. But it’s not “automated.” Pages are best for content that’s not going to be updated very often. For example, the About Us page or Contact Us or Company Missions.
You could also, this gets a little technical, have an automated list of your event posts … OK, I’m getting ahead of myself. So yes, you could make this page do some fancy tricks and have content dynamically pulled into it … but then we’re sorta talking about what a category does.
Category
Use a category to show the latest posts in that category.
A category is a collection of posts in that category. It will show the list of those posts. Depending on your theme, this usually will show, per post:
- Post title
- Featured image
- Meta data (author, date posted, etc.)
- Excerpt (or full content if you choose)
- Read more
- Comments
The downside of this approach is that it’s just that: a list. You can style this list (and use layout features) to kinda get it to list in ways that you’d like, but it’s not like a page that you can go in there and make it look exactly as you’d like. It’s a list, you can make the items sort or show as you’d like, but at the end of the day, it’s a list.
One note is that if it’s a portfolio or at least if you have featured images for each post, you can also choose to show just those in a grid format with the title underneath. Still, it’s a list of posts in a category.
[…] Pages vs. Categories (Sep 18) […]
Bradley, so if I want to post on my homepage, but have the post also appear on another page or multiple pages (like a category but a real page) how would I do that?
Hi Sue,
You’d want to create a post and then for each time you want it to show up create a category and categorize that post with all of the categories you’d like. A post can belong to multiple categories so have that category show up on the home page but then also another (category) index. Does that make sense?
Not sure…I have my website set up to appear as a website not a blog. There are several pages in the top navigation menu that are like categories. So, when I post something it goes to the general category – home page, but I want it to appear additionally on specific other pages.
Thanks
Yes, so you’ll want those other pages (actually, they’re “category index pages”) to be other categories (Fruit, Vegetables, etc.) and then when you post, you’ll classify a post (Apple) under the category Fruit so it will show up on that page–and the home page.
I think I have done that but the posts dont go to the other pages. How do you create *category index pages* vs regular pages? Thanks