Planning the site’s organization and creating the Pages.

The primary difference between an informational Web site and a blog is that a Web site’s content stays pretty much the same from day to day while a blog’s content changes regularly when new posts are added. That’s one of the reasons that blog entries display the date and have date archives. This kind of functionality wasn’t what I needed for the new Flying M Air Web site.

WordPress, of course, offers the static Page feature which makes it possible to create content that exists outside the blog’s chronology. Unfortunately, pages don’t make use of the Category feature, which is another way that blog entries are organized.

Let me take a moment to explain the kind of information I needed to convey to site visitors and how I wanted to organize it.

• First, I had a bunch of very static, unlikely to change information, such as the company background, contact information, and information about the helicopter. Although this could be presented using blog entries with a “General Information” category, I wanted to present it separately, using the page feature.
• I also had descriptions for the tours, day trips, excursions, and other services I offer. I wanted to group these together by category, which seemed like a logical organization for me. Now although I could create a separate page for each description as a subpage under a parent page, I thought that approach would be difficult to manage. So I decided to use blog entries for each description, assigning one or more categories as necessary.

The theme I had chosen and modified (a version of Andreas, as I discussed in Part 2 of this series) had a very nice horizontal navigation bar at the bottom of the header, perfect for WordPress Pages. But I worried that site visitors might be confused by two separate and apparently unrelated navigation bars: the nice horizontal one on top and the vertical one in the right sidebar, which included the list of categories. If I didn’t include information about my services in the top navigation bar, site visitors might not find it. So I decided to create summary Pages that listed and described several categories of tours and services, providing category links for each one.

Here’s how it works. On the top navigation bar, there’s a Tours & Day Trips link. Clicking that link displays a WordPress Page that discusses three categories of services: Tours, Short Day Trips, and Arizona Day Trips. Clicking one of the “Learn More” links on that page displays the category with its tours.

With this approach, a visitor could find my services, no matter which navigation method he used.

Once I decided on an approach, it was time to create the pages. I created eight pages: Tours & Day Trips, Excursions, Charters & Other Services, Get Brochures, Q & A, About Us, About Our Helicopter, and Contact us.

Although I didn’t create the pages in that order, I wanted them to appear in that order. So I used the Page Order field in the Write Page administration panel to assign a page number to each page. I skipped numbers when numbering them so I could easily change the order by changing just one Page’s Page Order value.

The Get Brochures Page currently provides links to downloadable PDF files. I didn’t use the link feature or any special template for the Page — although I could have. It didn’t seem worth the extra effort. But now I’m thinking that might be a good idea so the downloadable links appear on every page. So if you look at the site and that Page is missing, check the sidebar for the Brochure links; I’ll probably move them there.

The Contact Us page provides contact information for Flying M Air as well as an e-mail contact form. The contact form was created with the WP-ContactForm plugin by Ryan Duff. Miraz discusses this plugin in Chapter 7 of our WordPress book, so I won’t go into detail about it here.

In the next installment of this series, I’ll tell you about the conditional statements I used in the sidebar to list all tours for the currently viewed category.