Every website is made of pages and maybe posts(your blog). A page is different from a post in that a page is static whereas a post is dynamic. A post is content that you will keep posting to your blog. A page on the other hand very rarely changes. Every time you want to create a new menu item you have to create a page in WordPress.
Add A New Page – Initial
- Hit the Pages option from the Dashboad on the left hand side (LHS) of WordPress and then Click on ‘Add New’. The Add New Page will be brought up.
- Add your New page title. The Page title be default becomes your menu item name. But this menu item can be changed later
- Change to the ‘HTML’ tab if you are pasting text from another document such as word. Switch back to the ‘Visual’ tab to make any other changes to your page such as making text bold etc.
- This box is called the ‘Kitchen Sink’. As you can see the ‘Kitchen Sink’ is the same as in Adding Posts. Mouse over each icon to get an explaination of what it does.
- Mouse over the icons and click on the relevant icon to upload an image.
- Add your content here or paste your content if copying from another document.
- Preview your document as many times as needed.
Adding a new page in WordPress – SEO
- ‘Page Atrributes’ define where this new page will get dispayed. It lists all the existing pages of your Website. If this new page is to be visible from your Website’s main menu, then select ‘no parent’ as above. However if this page is to be part of a sub-menu then select the existing parent page for this new page. For eg. if you wish to have this new page under the ‘About’ page then select the ‘About’ page. In the above example ‘FAQ’ is a main menu page and all its child pages (sub-menu) are displayed under it.
- Look for the SEO Details box. Adding SEO tags help Search Engines find your pages.
- If you do not enter anything here the title of your page witll be used.You can instead write a 70 character long custom title about your page.
- Write a more detailed description of your page filling it with the keywords from your page but make sure it is synopis of the content of your page in not more than 150 characters
- Add the keywords of your Page seperated by a comma. This box is being use less and less by search engines so focus more on points 2 and 3.
- Don’t forget to Publish your page or your changes will not be saved.
Adding a new page in WordPress – Comments
- Uncheck these 2 boxes to prevent readers of this page from leaving a comment. It is preferable to allows readers to only leave comments only on your posts and not on your pages.
- Don’t forget to hit the ‘Publish’ button seen in the previous step to Save your changes
Making your new page visible to the world.
Do this only if the new page is to be visible from the menu or submenu.
- On the WordPress Dashboard look for ‘Appearances’ on the LHS. Click on Appearances. This will bring up all the ‘Appearance’ options Click on ‘Menus’.
- This will bring up the Menus screen.
- Click on the Menu you wish to add your new page. In this case it is the ‘Main Menu’
- Look under the ‘Pages’ option to select the page you wish to add to your’ Main Menu’.
- In this example lets say I want to add the ‘FAQ’ page to the ‘Main Menu’. So check the check box next to ‘FAQ’.
- Click on the ‘Add to Menu’ button.
- The ‘FAQ’ page will now be added to the ‘Main Menu’. You can drag and drop this menu up and down with your mouse to the specfic place you wish the ‘FAQ’ page to appear in your menu. You can also drag the menu sideways if the menu is a sub-menu. Like in this example, the ‘FAQ’ page is a sub-menu of ‘My Account’.
- You can also change the title of the page that appears on the Menu by clicking on the arrow. This will open up an edit box where you can change the text of the ‘Navigation Label’ and ‘Title Attribute’.
- Categories just like page can also be added to the menu. For eg. if you want to add all posts that have beed assinged the category ‘Tutorials’, check the ‘Tutorials’ category.
- Click on the ‘Add to Menu’ and follow points 7 & 8.
- Finally hit the ‘Save Menu’ for all your changes to be saved.