ITC298 > The Anatomy of a WordPress Site

Now that you are absolutely convinced that WordPress is the most awesome thing next to clean air, let’s take a look at how it works.

The anatomy of a WordPress site can be broken down into two basic camps:

  1. Postings: items presented in a chronological and news-like fashion
  2. Pages: main and sub categories of your website’s information architecture

Postings

Postings are the foundation upon which blogs are built.

On a blog, the content consists of articles (also sometimes called “posts” or “entries”) that the author(s) writes.

— http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging

You have probably noticed internship, job, and general announcement emails from me. These are actually postings that I make on this site. I then use a plugin to have them sent to you if you are subscribed to this site.

I have chosen to place my postings on the Home Page of this site:

anatomy-postings1

http://www.premiumdw.com/SCCC/

You can see that all of my postings show up in a chronological order of when they were published. They can also be broken into categories for easy navigation.

The Home Page of this site then becomes a written record of all of my individual postings:

anatomy-posting1

http://www.premiumdw.com/SCCC/2009/06/04/web-design-development-with-wordpress-itc298/

Each posting of mine has:

  1. Title: the title of the posting can show up as your headline
  2. Date: the date will let the reader know when this was posted
  3. Category: all postings can be grouped into categories for easy navigation
  4. Content: without good or relevant content, everything else will merely be a placeholder

Each posting can also be viewed as an individual web page where a reader can leave a comment:

http://www.premiumdw.com/SCCC/2009/06/04/web-design-development-with-wordpress-itc298/

http://www.premiumdw.com/SCCC/2009/06/04/web-design-development-with-wordpress-itc298/

You can see that Kate & I have had a good conversation here.

Pages

Pages are the typical groups of information in your website information architecture. These groups are usually broken into main categories and sub categories that get displayed in your site’s navigation.

I use pages to display all of my lecture materials to you:

http://www.premiumdw.com/SCCC/itc200/finding-choosing-your-product/

http://www.premiumdw.com/SCCC/itc200/finding-choosing-your-product/

This way, all of my lectures, assignments and class pages can be organized into a hierarchical structure that I hope you find user-friendly.

I have also been able to publish my (student) content with much more speed and flexibility now that my student website is powered with WordPress.

Yee-haw.

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