WordPress categories enables you to organize your website in a more structured way. Just like a printed publication i.e. newspapers, magazines, etc., are organized into sections per topic (i.e. news, sports, health, classified ads, etc.) so can you organize your website in such manner. These sections are called categories in WordPress. When you create a post or an article, you can then assign them a category in which they belong to. A WordPress Post can have more than one categories. A WordPress Page cannot belong to any category.
Difference between a Post and a Page
Basically, the difference between a Post and a Page is that an article posted, gets included in your RSS Feed while a Page does not. New articles are best created in a post so that they can be syndicated. Other parts of your website such as your Contact Us details, About Us details, etc., are best created using Pages.
As part of planning your website, it’s good to create the basic categories that your site will have. In the case of this website, our major categories are:
- Articles
- SEO
- Internet Marketing
- WordPress Plugin Review
- Advanced WordPress Tutorial
Posts within these categories are tutorials that supplements and complements the main information that this website gives – and that’s how to create your own website.
How to create a WordPress category
To create a category perform the following steps:
1 – Login to your WordPress website.
2 – The Dashboard will load
3 – On the Dashboard, click on the category link
4 – The Categories screen will appear
5 – On the Categories screen, enter Name and Slug of your new category. The slug will appear as part of your website’s permalink. In the example below, the Mobile category is added. This means that if you type: http://htmlpress.net/category/mobile, you will be able to see a summary of posts that are included in this category.
6 – Optional: You can also select a Parent category. Once, the Mobile category is saved, for example, you can create another category called Android and in the Parent field, select Mobile as its parent category. This option becomes useful when your website will contain a lot of posts and requires a high degree of organization in order to make it more user friendly.
7 – Click on the Add New Category button.
8 – Your new category should now appear on the list of categories found on the right hand side of the page.
Common Issue
If you are getting this message “The slug category is already in use by another term” while creating a category, be sure that no other categories are using the same slug that you have given your new category. Once you have verified that no other categories use this slug, then check your tags. To do this, just go to the Post | Post Tags menu.