Have you ever pondered on what the word ‘post’ means? 

Well when you use WordPress as your website, you get more than just ‘pages’ of your site. You also get the blog ‘post’ feature.

Each WordPress post is tied to a specific time, and can be organized by categories and tags. You can let people comment on your posts, which is a fantastic way to engage your blog readers. Using blog posts also helps your website to have meaningful, fresh content, which is great for marketing and for the search engine optimization.

Now, you could keep things simple, and just create a website with pages only. That would be considered a CMS (Content Management System) site. Fancy words for ‘just a simple straightforward site’. People typically use WordPress ‘pages’ to create web pages with static content that doesn’t change often. Pages are not time-specific, and you can organize them in a hierarchical  way with parent pages and sub ‘child’ pages.  But don’t get caught up in that jargon now, as we are talking about blog posts today.

This blog post article you are reading now is created using the ‘post’ feature.

So, what does the word ‘post’ mean?

We’ve seen so many new terms become our everyday words as the online world expanded dramatically especially over the past couple of decades. One of such terms is ‘post.’ That’s the term we hear all the time especially on social media, but I noticed that there are still people who are not very clear about what it means and how it’s used.

You can use ‘post’ as a verb and also as a noun.

‘Post’ as a Verb

‘Posting’ means you are adding content online. The content can be an article, comment, message, and more. That can be done on a website, social media, an online forum, and so forth. ‘Posting’ simply can mean the action of creating a blog post and publishing it, too.

Example: “Did you post a comment on my blog?”

Example: “I just posted a funny photo on Instagram.”

‘Post’ as a Noun

When used as a noun, a ‘post’ refers to online content. A blog article is typically called a blog ‘post.’ When somebody add a message to social media, that message can be called a ‘post’ as well.

Example: “Where is the post?”

Example: “There were so many silly April Fool’s Day joke posts today on Facebook!”

Hope my explanation is helpful in demystifying how the term ‘post’ is being used everywhere these days.  You can also read more WordPress tips blog posts here .

So are you creating blog posts and posting them to social media yourself?  (if not I can help you with that in the next Website Creation Workshop Class!) If you still have any questions or comments, please go ahead and ‘post’ a comment below!

(this article was first published Nov 3, 2009)