6 replies to this topic

[janetrae]

A web developer and I are reconstructing a website using Wordpress, and she has asked if she can use categories instead of pages for organizing the site. The Home page will have 5 to 7 subjects in the main navigation, and each subject area will have many articles. In addition, there will be a blog for new articles. 

 

My gut is that pages should be used, but the web developer is pressing me for a reason, because categories are easier to manage. The forum manager on the WordPress site clearly favors using a custom menu and categories, when assessing how other sites should be constructed. Is there any compelling reason to use one or the other?

 

Many thanks!

janetrae 

[torka]

If you're talking about articles that naturally group into categories, then the developer is right - categories and posts would be easier to manage. Pages can be assigned as sub-pages of another page, but that's not really the same thing, and the whole navigation thing gets a little trickier when you start putting a whole bunch of content out there on sub-pages.

 

My company uses Wordpress as a CMS for our corporate site. On our website, we use pages for things like our resource download page, our "about us" page and the contact page -- things that are relatively static and that essentially stand alone or have only one or two equally static sub-pages. And we use the category/post format for our press releases and our newsletter articles (among other things). Stuff that gets added to more often, and that has sometimes dozens of related articles.

 

With custom menus and a judicious use of widgets, you can get really creative with how you display and navigate among these articles.

 

Maybe if I understood what your concerns were with posts and why you're leading toward using pages, I could better address the issues.

 

--Torka

[janetrae]

Thank you! I don't really have "concerns" about posts - it's just that I have a hard time understanding them. If the seo is going to work either way, then I'll give the web developer free rein to do it. 

 

The project involves taking about 250 articles and organizing them on the website so the reader can access the information. The writer has done a great job combining the shorter articles and sorting them into about 5 categories. She will continue to write articles and publish them in the blog. I'm not a web developer, and am finding WordPress a real challenge to grasp (but slowing getting more with each project).

 

Many thanks for your input.

 

Janet

[Jill]

Just make sure she makes a finite number of categories (which it sounds like she's doing). Where it can become a problem is if you can keep creating new categories for every post (like many wrongly do with tags). 

 

Overall, it sounds like your developer has a good handle on the issues and is doing things just right!

[SelfMade]

Where it can become a problem is if you can keep creating new categories for every post (like many wrongly do with tags).

 

Am I doing it wrong then?

 

Because right now on one of my sites, whenever I make a new post, I create new tags SPECIFIC to that post.

 

I do use other "most used tags" if they are relevant.

 

And also, which is best:

 

mysite.com/post-name-here

 

OR

 

mysite.com/category/post-name-here

 

Which is best in your opinion that you know to be good.

[Jill]

Because right now on one of my sites, whenever I make a new post, I create new tags SPECIFIC to that post.

 

Yeah, I've seen that cause problems, especially if you repeat the entire post on the category page. 

 

As for the URL IMO shorter is always better

[SelfMade]

Thanks for that.

 

I do sometimes apply the post to more than one category, only to benefit the visitor for navigation purposes, because some posts I make could fall into more than one category, this could cause duplicates as you say.