How Are They Different And What You Need to Know
As far as content goes, you can create pages or posts (or both) on your new WordPress blog. There are some differences. Let’s start with creating a landing page in WordPress and then move into the management of the other pages and posts.

You may want to create a landing page for your blog so that whenever someone types in your domain, this is the page they’ll see first (as opposed to a blogroll where the first post that is seen is always in order from most recent to oldest).

Log into your dashboard and click on ‘Pages’ in the sidebar. Next, click on ‘Add New’. Create the landing page that you want and then go ahead and publish it. After it’s live, go to ‘Settings’ and then click on the ‘Reading’ link.

At the top, it will say ‘Reading Settings’ and then ‘Your homepage displays’. Make sure that you click the radio button that says ‘A static page’.  You will see a drop-down menu of pages that you can choose from as the static landing page your visitors will see first.

You can do the same thing with a post if you prefer to make it a post rather than a page. If you do it this way, just make it a sticky post that stays at the top of your blog at all times, rather than showing the reverse chronological order for entries.

Pages typically aren’t listed according to any dated order. They sometimes appear in the bar across the top of the WordPress theme. If you prefer, you can add a widget to your WordPress sidebar to display the pages.

To do this, go to ‘Appearance’, then Widgets. Drag the ‘Pages’ widget over to your sidebar wherever you want it to appear to your visitors. And you can create sub-pages for your WordPress blog as well.

Click on ‘Add New’ to the ‘Pages’ area. On the right, you’ll see an option for ‘Page Attributes’. You can assign a parent page to it. And you can even put the pages in any order you want them to be seen.

Your sub-pages would then appear below the parent page in the URL. So let’s say you have an ‘About’ page on your blog. And under it, as a sub-page, you want a page called ‘Services’. Your domain would then look like this: www.domain.com/about/services.

You could add more sub-pages below that, so your URL would look like this: www.domain.com/about/services/pool-cleaning (to use that niche as an example). Whenever someone hovers over your main page in the sidebar or header, they would see the sub-pages branching out.

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Getting Started With Widgets
Whenever you install a new blog you’ll notice that in the sidebar there are some default items. Yet, when you log into your dashboard and look at the widgets, there’s nothing showing up in the sidebar.

What’s going on?

That’s because WordPress, or your theme, has installed some default widgets as a way of showing you what it would look like to add content to your sidebar.

You can easily get rid of these default items and leave your sidebar blank just by adding a ‘Text’ widget and leaving it empty. As soon as anything is added to the sidebar manually by you the default items will automatically disappear.

Log into your dashboard and click on ‘Appearance’ and then ‘Widgets’. This is where you can add items to your sidebar area.  You may also find that you have more than one sidebar depending on the layout of your theme (for example, there may be a sidebar on each side of the content for a three-column theme). As well, the number of widgets that appear will vary based on your theme.

Default Widgets
In most cases, you will find an average of 15 widgets already pre-installed in the ‘Available Widgets Area’. You can add any of these to your sidebar.

I will highlight some options here, but please know that you may not have all of these. Again, it is based on the theme that you have installed.

First is the ‘AddThis’ widget. When you drag it into your sidebar, you’ll need to customize it to show the social networking sites the way you want them to be shown and then save and close the widget.

The ‘Calendar’ widget lets you place a calendar on your sidebar that hyperlinks the days when you published a blog post. Visitors can hover over the day and see what the post title is so they know if they want to read it or not.

You can also create a ‘Custom Menu’ in a widget that showcases whatever elements of your blog you want. You can drag the ‘Pages’ widget over to highlight the pages if you’d rather they show up here than below the header. You can sort them and exclude certain ones as well.

The ‘Recent Posts’ widget lets you choose how many posts are shown. The default value is set to five.

Then there is a ‘Search’ widget that will let your visitors search for blog posts based on certain keywords. Another one is the ‘Text’ widget that allows you to place text or HTML code (hyperlinked images, for example) in it.

The ‘Askimet’ widget just tells people how many Spam comments have been blocked. This may deter spammers from attempting to post comments to your blog. Next, the ‘Archives’ widget lets you create a drop-down menu that shows the month and number of blog posts made during that time frame so visitors can see past blog posts.

The ‘Categories’ widget does something similar. Visitors can see how many posts are in each category and click through to visit them.

Next, the ‘Links’ widget lets you showcase your blogroll and even the rating you give the links.

You may want to add a ‘Meta’ widget so you can log in from the site’s home page, or showcase participation through the ‘Recent Comments’ widget. You can also add an ‘RSS’ widget for subscribers and a ‘Tag Cloud’ widget to see what’s popular on your site.

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