The Three “P’s” of WordPress

As a marketing student I learned about the Four “P”s of marketing: product, place, price, and promotion. Every marketing decision can be traced back to a strategy supporting one or more of these important “P”s.

The Three “P’s” of WordPress

As a WordPress web designer, I have discovered three new “P”s : page, post, and project. These wordpress formats are the building blocks of your website, each playing an important, but distinct role that has evolved as the software evolved. While the average visitor can’t tell the difference between the three building blocks, but how they function in search and archives is very different so choosing the right one each time is important to improve both SEO and user experience.

The WordPress Page

Historically, pages had the most formatting flexibility. These days with foundations like Guttenburger, Divi, and Genesis, that styling can be extended to any type of content. So do we still need to use the page format? The answer to that question is yes.

• The page format is best used for information which rarely changes. Typically pages like home, about, contact, service description, and team bios should be built in this format.
• Date created information is stored in the site database but is not published on the site. This prevents a site from looking out of date publicly.
• Pages are not typically created for social engagement. These information based pages typically do not include open comments, an author bio, or social share links.
• Pages can be arranged in a hierarchical structure which means a parent page can have sub pages assigned to it. This is particularly helpful if you have multiple products you want to group under one category. There was a time that only pages could be included in the navigation. This hierarchical structure was much more important at that time. Today with the ability to add posts, projects, and even links to create your own hierarchy it itsn’t as critical, but still helpful for visitors, and especially search engines looking to index related content.
• Pages are not included in the RSS feed of your website, used to syndicate blog content on other platforms so visitors can not subscribe to get page content delivered to their inbox.

The WordPress Post

WordPress started as blogging software so the core functionality really resides in the posts. For a business website, posts are a great place to capture all the information that doesn’t live within the core hierarchy. It is like a storage closet for things which don’t fit anywhere else.  Articles, audio, video, events, graphics, special offer landing pages, and more can be organized and stored in the blog.

Categories allow you to bring order to the chaos, collecting related information making it easy for a visitor to find a specific piece of content. In addition, a static page can be created to display blog posts from a single category and linked to the main menu. Don’t get hung up on the word blog – this is just content which changes more rapidly. We have seen clients call this section What’s New, News, Current Events, Special Tools etc. The bottom line is that content which is published regularly and often references time-sensitive or time-relevant material should be included in your blog.

Posts display differently: 

• There is a date and an author. This information is usually published on the site and posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order.
• They are designed to be social and will usually (but not always) include social sharing buttons, links to social profiles, commenting options, and an author bio. Over time, these current posts may actually attract more traffic than your core pages because of the new information included.
• Posts are included in the RSS feed of your website, used to syndicate blog content on other platforms like social media sites and are  included in the RSS feed, visitors can subscribe to get posts delivered to their inbox.
• Posts are archived by categories and tags, month, and year.

The WordPress Project

This specialized content is the ideal foundation for a portfolio site, but don’t stop there. Projects can be used for case studies, product samples and course work. The fundamental difference between a blog and a project is the ability to build a filterable portfolio.

• While there is an author, that information is typically not displayed.
• Projects are ordered by the date they’re created, with the most recent project displayed first.
• Categories and tags are featured prominently to allow visitors to navigate easily between related content.

Projects don’t make sense for every site, but they are a great way to showcase the best of what you do.

Now is a great time to experiment with different WordPress Formats