Pages are usually displayed alphabetically, but you can change the order pages are displayed in:

• your top navigation area of your theme using a custom navigation menu
• your pages widget by changing their page order

Using a Custom navigation menu

All Edublogs themes support custom menus which means you can customize your navigation menu and add a top navigation to any theme.

This allows you to easily:

• Re-arrange, add, and remove items from the menu bar at the top of your blog
• Change the order of pages
• Create nested pages
• Display posts on multiple pages by linking to category pages
• Add custom links to your navigation menu
• Create a custom menu for your sidebar

Custom menus allow you to fully control the links that appear in your navigation menu- you can even add links to website and pages not on your blog!

Below’s an example of a custom menu with nested pages and custom links:

Here’s how:

1. Go to Appearance > Menus in your blog’s dashboard

2.  Give your menu a name – ‘Main Menu’ will work great!

3. Click on the blue ‘Create Menu‘ button

4. A Theme Location box will appear in the top left. Choose your newly created menu from the drop-down box and click on ‘Save’

5. Select the page, categories, or custom links you want to add to your menu.

• Do this by dragging the link you want to make over to the main box on the right or click on Select All and Add to Menu.

6. Arrange the menu items as you want them to appear by drag and dropping.

• In the example below, ‘Contact’ will show in a drop-down nested page under ‘About’.

7.  Click ‘Save‘ when done.

8. Visit your blog and see your new menu!

Changing order of pages in your Pages Widget

You can change the order of pages in your widget by changing their page order.

Say for example you have four pages: About, Blogging Rules, Contact Me, Help and you wanted to change their order from alphabetical to About, Blogging Rules, Help, Contact Me.

All you need to do is the following:

1.  Go to Pages > All Pages

2.  Hover your mouse over a page title to bring up the action menus and then click on Quick Edit.

3. In the order field change the number to the new order you want the page to appear and click the Update.

• You repeat this process for all the pages, and numbering them from 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on for the Order field. This tells the blog to make these pages the first second, third and fourth items in the list.
• In our example,  we would add 1 to the Order for the About page, 2 to the Order for the  Blogging Rules, 3 to the Order for the  Help, and 4 to the Order for the Contact Me

4.  Now to display the pages in the correct order you just need to add your Pages widget to the desired sidebar, change it to Page order and then click Save.

Educators occasionally use a static home page to provide background information to parents or students about the purpose of the blog. Their Home page normally contains content that rarely changes and latest posts are viewed by clicking on the link to the Posts page.

This isn’t necessarily your best option. Take the time to first learn more about:

1. Differences Between Blog Pages and Posts
2. Differences Between Tags and Categories

How To Create a Static Home Page

1. Go to Page > Add New

2. Give the page the title Home, write the content you want displayed on the front page of your blog and click then Publish.

3. Click Page > Add New again and create a new page titled Posts.

• You don’t need to add content to this page since this is the page that will display your latest posts.

4. Go to Settings > Reading

5. Change your settings to A Static page with Front page: Home and Post Page: Posts and then click Save Changes.

The front page of your blog should contains the content that your wrote for the Home page and your latest posts are viewed by clicking on the link to the Posts page.

The Solution If You End Up With Two Home Links

With some themes you can end up with two Home links.

This happens because many themes are hard coded to display “Home” link even when there are no other pages on the blog.

To remove the second Home link you just edit the Home page to make it a sub page of another page.

Pages appear in the Pages widget and in navigation tabs across the top of some themes.

Examples of pages commonly used by educators include:

• An About page – for readers to find out more about you and your blog. Readers often use it to decide whether to bother subscribing to a blog.
• Blogging Rule and Guidelines – used on Class blogs to explain how-to’s, rules, guidelines for students and their families
• Contact page – provides your contact details
• Info For First Time Visitors! – for new readers to understand how to subscribe to the blog and leave comments

Video

Writing a New Page

There are two ways to create a new page:

1.  Clicking on Page > Add New in your dashboard

2.  Selecting New Page in the dropdown menu in the admin bar

Brief Overview of Using Your Page Screen

Your Page screen works very similar to your Post screen except that:

• You don’t assign categories or tags to pages
• You can arrange your pages in hierarchies, using sub-pages, to nest pages under other pages

Writing a page is similar to writing a post.

Use these instructions for both posts and pages.

1. Writing your First Post – But you can’t assign categories or tags to pages
2. How to insert links in your post
3. Inserting images into your Posts
4. Inserting photo gallery into your Posts
5. Inserting video or audio files into your posts
6. Embedding Videos from Video Sharing Websites into Posts
7. Inserting Documents, PDF and PowerPoints into Posts
8. Editing Posts
9. Scheduling a post for a later date
10. Why you shouldn’t write your post in MS Word

1. Posts
2. Pages

New bloggers often struggle with the concept of posts and pages.

Introduction to Posts

Posts are where you publish the latest update or new article on a blog.

Posts are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order with the most recent post at the top of the page (e.g. check out the Teacher Challenge blog).

Most of the content published on a blog is normally written as Posts.   The information you want to share or reflect on are normally published as Posts and not on Pages.

Blogs are designed to have only one Post page which normally displays on the homepage of the blog.

If you look closely at a post you will see it is normally made up of:

1. Post Title – tells the reader what the post is about.  A great post title grabs readers attention and is more likely to encourage them to read your post.
2. Date published – all post display the date a post was published.  You’ll normally see this displayed at the top of the post.
3. Categories and tags - are used to help readers locate information in different ways.  We’ll explain how to use categories and tags in a later activity in this series.
4. Your post content – this is the main information that you want to share or reflect on with your readers
5. A link to comments - This is where your readers can click to write a comment in response to your post.  Comments give readers an opportunity to share their thoughts, connect with you and interact with other readers.

Introduction to Pages

Pages on blogs are normally used for information that you want to share with your readers but don’t expect to update frequently.

Example of Pages used on blogs

1. The most common type of Page on a blog is the About page.   Your About Page is used for telling readers more about yourself and your blog.
2. Class blogs often use Pages for Blogging Rules and Guidelines (check out these examples of Blogging Rules and Guidelines on class blogs).

There are key differences between pages and posts that are important to understand when working with them.

Properties of posts are:

• Blog posts appear in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post is the first post that your readers see
• Posts are dynamic (updated regularly) and have time stamps i.e. display the date posted
• You can assign tags and categories to organise blog posts
• Posts appear in RSS feeds i.e. your readers who subscribe to your blog will receive your latest post in their feed reader

See Also: What Are The Properties of A Page?

Properties of pages are:

• Blog pages are displayed independently of post history and are more static i.e. remain the same from day to day since they are rarely updated
• You normally use pages for information that you want to share with your readers but don’t expect to update frequently. e.g. Edublogs Info! on The Edublogger is a page
• Pages don’t have time stamps i.e. don’t show the date they were posted
• Blog pages can appear anywhere on your blog depending on your blog theme
• You can change the order pages appear. Pages are normally displayed in alphabetical order but their order can be changed using Page Order
• You can’t assign tags and categories to pages
• Pages don’t appear in RSS feeds so readers need to visit your site to view the latest updates to pages
• You can’t embed posts into a page
• You can create sub-pages which you assign to a parent page to build a more complex site

See Also:  What Are The Properties of A Post?