When you are using WordPress as a content management system, one of the first things that come to mind is how to organize your content in relation to the theme you are using. In many premium themes, you will find Pages being used to simulate a ‘blog’ which is what I do on this site. You will also find Pages being used in navigation menus. Naturally this causes confusion because these things are already built in by default. Why use Pages and not categories?

My personal preference is to always use categories to organize content. Even if you feed posts in to a Page you still have to rely on categories – that is, how you can instruct WordPress which posts to display. One of the reasons why many people use Pages in the navigation and then pull in posts from a specific category into the page is because they want a nicer looking URL. Since you cannot get rid of the /category/ in the URL when you display all posts in a category, using Pages is a work around. There are some plugins to remove the category base but I’ve not found them to be very reliable.

On this site I use both. My blog is not really a blog. It is a Page where I pull and display ALL posts. There is also a downloads page. If you click through that, you will see that is a category archive – the /category/ in the URL is a dead giveaway. I could have done it the way I did the blog. Create a Page, assign a special Page template that pulls only posts from the downloads category but I just haven’t bothered to do so and will probably suffer some in terms of SEO. Until then, for practical getting-things-up-and-running purposes it works.