My Newest Section ‘Recent Blogs‘ and Taking Stock of vsatips
Updated 8/11/20
I decided to add a new section to my website today…I’m calling it ‘Recent Blogs’. ‘Recent Blogs’ will include some of the more interesting or useful webpages I’ve written in the last year and a half (that’s when I began my site.) Sometimes I write an article that I put on my website as a webpage, rather than as a blog post.
Pages and posts are the 2 primary ways of adding content to a WordPress site. They differ some in terms of how WordPress organizes and deals with them. I’ve been writing both, but I’ve recently grown to realize that my posts, in general, are read much more often than my pages are. Yet oftentimes my pages represent some of my better work. My pages tend to be longer, more detailed articles. The reason I chose to submit them as pages was primarily for navigational purposes…pages are much easier to add into WordPress menus. Therefore, I assumed that they would also be easier for people to find. While that may be true…the reality is that my pages aren’t being sought out or read very frequently.
I’m not entirely sure yet why that is. It may be that Google treats pages differently than posts and my posts may have higher page ranks…therefore more people find them more readily by Googling. Or it may be that the ‘following’ aspect of WordPress is more powerful than I recognize. When I submit a new post, my followers are notified of it via email or via the WordPress Reader if they are fellow bloggers. When I submit a new webpage…nothing like that occurs. However, my sense is that more readers arrive at my site via Google, than via any other method. So…I’m perplexed. Which is why I decided to create a separate menu item for those articles. ‘Recent Blogs’ will, IMHO include some of my finest work. I’m really interested to see if this change will have any bearing on making those articles more popular, for lack of a better word.
So, in essence, my biggest reason for adding this section is because I’m still trying to figure out what exactly the differences are between posts and pages…both within the confines of WordPress and in the much bigger picture too.
Initially, when I was first setting up this site, I struggled a lot with which format to use. I think my overall approach is somewhat unique in that I don’t write about my daily life or journal about some interesting hobby or niche, and I’m not really striving to master a particular writing style, as many bloggers do or are.
I primarily write ‘How To’ articles. Yet I’m a solo person who’s doing this all on her own. There are a lot of great sites that offer excellent material in the ‘How To’ realm. Lifehacker, iMore and iGeeksblog immediately come to mind…but there are quite a few more great ones that I rely upon daily. Those sites I think are places that many bloggers gravitate to if they are writing about the kinds of tech topics that I am.
There are 2 main reasons that I didn’t join an existing entity:
- First, I was really a complete newbie when I began this and I didn’t recognize at the time that that was how many of those sites work…but I get it now.
- My site evolved from my writing ‘How To’ emails to friends and family members. Oftentimes these were about really very basic concepts. Concepts that I felt were too basic to be appropriate for the type of sites that I visit on a daily basis. It never really dawned on me that anyone beyond my friends and family would ever visit my site!
But, it turns out that I was wrong. In a year and a half’s time I’ve been completely awestruck by how many visitors come to my site. And the numbers just keep growing. It’s very cool to recognize that not only are my daily little tech struggles pretty typical and experienced by a lot of other people too, people who are in many ways much more like me than not…but also that I’ve managed to come up with some ideas that warrant other’s attention!
It’s cool because it turns out that I really, really like writing for my website. I’m constantly facing my own little challenges in regards to tech issues. So when I finally figure something out, especially if it’s something I’ve struggled with for a very long time, I’m super excited to share my new revelation! In many cases those issues are ones I’ve searched high and low for solutions too, but have utterly failed to find one iota of help in solving. Those issues have sort of forced me to come up with my own ‘brute force’ solutions to them…(brute force was the method my middle school math teacher told me I used to solve most of the math problems I was presented with…for some reason it really bugged her that I couldn’t follow along with her approved methods…and truly I couldn’t have even if my life depended upon it…but I still came up with the correct answer.)
My solutions may not be all that eloquent but they work regardless. Just like the fact that vsatips may not have ended up being as cool of a site as I’d originally envisioned…but on many levels it works anyway…which is sort of cool because that tells me that I’ve succeeded in one very important goal. That goal was to create my own unique voice that was a really good representation of me. I think I that succeeded in that regard because vsatips, like me, mostly works in spite of its flaws…yet knows it and wants to be better!
If you want to learn a little bit more about how I chose between writing a page versus a post, you can use this link and scroll down to the section from June 2014.
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