This is a basic WordPress tutorial for end users. WordPress has many of capabilities but only a few areas are important for most end users. Part II will cover Adding Pages. See Part I for Adding Users and Part III for Writing Posts.
Adding Pages
For whatever reason, sometimes you need to create a new page for your website. Sometimes it’s permanently, sometimes only temporarily.
1. To create a new page click on Pages and then Add New.
2. Give your page a Title. Depending on the design of your website, the page title may or may not appear on the published page.
3. Write the content for your page. See Part III: Writing Posts for more details.
4. Links to all pages will appear in the navigation bar. Use the “Page Attributes” window to set the navigation properties. Your website will have top-level links (ex: Home, About, Contact Us). It may also have sublinks (Ex: About->What we do, About->Who we are). If yours is a top-level link, leave Parent set to “(no parent)”. If your page is a sublink, click on the Parent drop-down and choose which main link it will appear under (Ex: for Who we are, choose About).
5. You will also need to set the link order. The Order number under “Page Attributes” determines the position of the link. Every page has a number assigned to it. By default, the assigned number is zero. Zero makes a link first. As the number gets higher, the link gets lower (Ex: Home=0=first, About=3=second, Contact Us=7=last). Say you want to create a temporary conference page that comes after About, but before Contact Us. If About has an Order number of 3 and Contact us has an order number of 7, Conference can have an order number of 4, 5, or 6 to go in between.
6. There are several options in the “Publishing” window.
7. When working on a page that you’re not ready to publish yet, click the Save Draft button.
8. If you want to see what the page will look like, but you’re not ready to publish it yet, click the Preview button. This will open a new window and show you what the final page will look like.
9. Status: Draft vs. Pending Review — If you click Edit next to Status you will see a drop-down menu with the options of Draft or Pending Review. Typically, you’ll just leave the status as draft (the default). You would probably only change the status to Pending Review if someone else is supposed to review the page before it is published. Users with the role of “Contributor” cannot publish posts, so they set the post status to Pending Review to let an editor know it’s ready to publish.
10. Visibility — By default, the visibility is Public. This is what you will usually want to use. However, if you click Edit, you have the option to set it as Password Protected or Private. With Password Protected, you set the password and then you will have to share the password with anyone you want to have access to that page. You probably won’t use this option very often. Private is useful if you have a members only section. Logged in members can see private pages, but not the general public.
11. Publish immediately is the default publishing setting. With this setting, if you hit the Publish button your page will be seen immediately. Lets go back to that conference page, though. You might not want anyone to have access to that page for another two weeks. You can click Edit and then change the publishing date to two weeks in the future. Then, when you click the Publish button will automatically publish on the date you set, but not a minute earlier.
12. You can click on the Pages link to see a list of all your pages, their authors, etc.
13. If you want to remove a page from the public view, just set it as a draft again.