Before you adjust how your site looks, you need to have some sample content available. How this content will be displayed will depend on which Theme you are using. When you installed WordPress it came with some default Theme, or you may have been asked to select a Theme as part of the installation process. It doesn’t really matter which Theme you are using right now, because you will be changing it several times as part of your learning process.

WordPress can work with many different kinds of content, such as blog articles, online books, pictures, video, audio, data structures, and other things. In geek talk, these are all called “content types“. You will learn how to work with all of the most important content types in coming tasks.

Right now it will be best if you get started with written content. WordPress has two different content types for text. For this task you will need to create a few samples of each of the two kinds of text so you can see how they differ.

A Post is a chunk of text that is usually shown to the user in date order, with the most recent content shown first. This “last in, first out” sequencing of content is the key format for a blog, which puts emphasis on current news and updates. For presenting time-sensitive content, Posts are the way to go.

A Page is a chunk of text that is usually shown to the user in some structured order, most often as part of a hierarchy. A book, for example, might be organized into chapters, with sequential reading order of Pages. Or your botany site might be organized by species within genus. Pages can be structured into complex taxonomies in ways that Posts are not able to do. WordPress usually comes pre-configured with one default page called “About”, which is intended to convey information about the site. Have you ever seen a site that does not have an “About” page?

To complete this task…

Don’t overthink this writing job! You only need test content right now, and at this stage of the game no one is reading any of it but you. So bang out three samples of each of the two content types and see how they look on your current Theme.

Create at least three Posts and see how their date order affects their display position using your current Theme.

Create at least three Pages and see how (or if) they are visible using your current Theme. If your site came with a default “About” page, edit it to reflect your new site’s purpose.

Once you have completed this task you will have enough content available to move on to Task 12: Begin to test Themes.