WordPress Wednesday: Page Management
Posted on March 25th, 2009
If you use WordPress as a blogging platform, you probably focus much more energy on the posts of your blog. This is your core content and this is why readers would want to come by and read what you have to say. The pages almost serve as a secondary role, because they’re there for background information. As part of this supporting role, they can aim to inform readers about who you are, how much you charge for advertising, what are some of the most popular posts, what is your contact information, and so forth. If you use WordPress as a CMS for a static site, the pages can take up on much more primary role.
In either situation, you should not forget about the importance of your pages. They shouldn’t be cast off and left to remain stagnant, because they still play a vital role in what your blog or website has to offer. By default, WordPress will list your pages in alphabetical order (based on the page slug) either across the top of the site or on your sidebar. This may not necessarily be the best order from a logical standpoint and you may not want to include every page in that listing. Your privacy policy, for instance, may be better suited for the footer. That’s the configuration I have on Beyond the Rhetoric, because it’s not really necessary to feature the privacy policy so prominently.
While you could write some custom code to handle this kind of customization, it’s probably a lot simpler and more user-friendly to use a plug-in. Speaking to this specific need is the PageMash Page Management plug-in from Joel Starnes. In a nutshell, it gives you a drag-and-drop GUI interface within the WordPress control panel to move the order of your pages around and block out the ones that you don’t want to be immediately visible. It’s simple and effective.
For more information, including a link to the installation file, check out the page on Wordpress.org.
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2 Comments
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I agree that pages are often forgotten about, personally I use daily posts to get the freshness factor of my blog up and use the pages to rank for high competition terms. The way to keep these pages also fresh is to bring in relevant snippets from your other posts so that the page content is always changing and evolving but keeps the same core message in order to rank in the search engines. Remember to nofollow unimportant pages as well, so just like putting the privacy policy in the footer as you suggest, but also nofollow it’s link will earn a bit of extra credit for other pages that are worthy of receiving traffic.
Definitely worth taking a look at, as most of us aren’t custom developers at all, and custom development costs money. WordPress is just amazing, what can I say?