Genre: Site, blog, or hybrid?

WordPress enables users to create either a blog (a living collection of posts with less focus on pages) or a website (a collection of pages with few or no posts) or a combination of both: a website and a blog in one location.

In the COMS 463 course, we may need to hybridize and combine the site (pages) with the blog (posts). Posts are the appropriate place for timely, frech content based on detailed, personalized data (such as data from journalistic interviews and events). Pages provide an overall structure that ties your content together as a whole and connects it to your organization.

Without using both posts and pages, when your community partner and instructor browses through your team’s collection, your Online Content will be disorganized (without enough pages), or too rigid and complex (without enough posts).

Content: its arrangement and usual strategies

Pages manage the ethos (organizational face) of a website or blog and provide overviews of its overall arrangement. The logos of pages is simple, brief, and instructional, welcoming users to take action, engage with the organization, or explore the website further.

Top-level or “level 1″ pages are linked to the main words on the navigation bar. They are “navigation pages” that provide a brief introduction and an annotated list of links to other sub-pages, or they are “content pages,” like a simple contacts page with no sub-pages.

“Level 2″ pages may either be “navigation pages” that briefly introduce sub-categories of content found in pages or posts, or may again be “content pages” containing stable, detailed information that always needs to be accessible.

Page authorship: Level 1 and 2 pages are likely to be authored or co-authored by the organization, the instructor, or the team coordinator because they perform high-level unifying, structuring and introductory functions. Anything lower than level 2 (detailed pages, and all posts) are more likely to be written by non-coordinators because they are usually more detailed and more specific to time and place, like information from interviews and textual research.

Posts focus on a different kind of logos (narrative, analysis, advice, and other forms of detailed argument), pathos (engagement, dialogue) and kairos (timeliness). The ethos of posts is often not that of the organization itself, but that of various editors and authors, and the people who are profiled, quoted or shown on posts. Pathos is another important feature of posts. Through posts, the organization creates a sense that it is inclusive and welcoming and deeply connected to its community and clients. They can author content and/or be featured in content and/or can add in smaller ways by replying or commenting to content.

In their arrangement, posts are accessed and organized differently from pages. Posts do not have a static structure in relation to the viewer and each other; they are like books in a library database. Viewers can find posts on a topic by clicking on names of topical or functional categories (which work like folders and subfolders) and tags (key words). Users might even click on the author’s name or icon if the posts are authored by a team and they want to read more posts by that author.  The rhetorical principle of kairos rules the structure of posts: when several posts exist within a category or in connection with a tag or author, they will always appear in date order, the most recent first.

Meta-Content (web design, overall layout)

The site header provides a visual organizational ethos (logo, images, blog/organization name). The size, location and customization of the header is controlled by the theme.

A tagline also provides a sense of purpose for the site/blog. This is a phrase near the blog/site name that expresses a description of what an organization is, its values, or
activities or mission, such as “creating communities.”

A navigation bar or menu on, above or below the header welcomes the reader to access the organization’s major stable, high priority content pages. These may appear as “tabs” or “buttons” on a horizontal and/or vertical bar. Nowadays the use of horizontal bars with “drop-down” menus that appear on mouse-over are becoming more popular because they conserve vertical space and can work in combination with a sidebar or side navigation bar below it.

The sidebar of the site/blog (usually links and tools on the right-hand or left-hand side alongside the content) is mainly for links and widgets (other blog tools and media) that enable users to access the site/blog’s content in various ways, or link to associated external content. The sidebar may also contain some spillover “header”-like content, such
as a paragraph of text welcoming a reader, or a stable image or logo.

The sidebar of a blog or website also enables the content to be placed in a narrower column of text, which makes it easier to read (shorter lines are easier to read than wide columns of text, even though long pages require vertical scrolling).

The footer of the site/blog (static frame at the bottom of every page) may also be another area for widgets. Usually the footer contains tools and information that enable interact with the organization more so than with blog content.

The user finds information and tools here to contact the organization, subscribe to the blog, manage their user profile, find out about the copyright policy for blog/site content, see a list of authors, view the organization’s calendar, etc.

Theme: All the features above, beside, and below the central content frame (posts and pages) are controlled by what WordPress calls a “theme.” Themes are equivalent to templates. They do not determine the rhetoric of online content, but they do structure it and frame it. Themes create visual unity and consistency for the whole site/blog, so that as core content changes, other elements stay the same, always accessible to users.

The theme determines the width of frames and makes available a limited number of standard widgets that can be placed around the content. It determines whether the page has “edges” and whether a colored, patterned or white background or fills the whole browser window. It determines whether the site/blog page becomes wider when the user stretches the window horizontally, or always has the same width. The theme also comes equipped with styles (a cascading style sheet or CSS) that manages the standard colors, fonts, bullet styles, etc. used across the whole site or blog.

The use of themes makes web design and content management easier for beginners and for large organizations because these basic, controlling elements of standardization would otherwise need to be programmed from scratch or pasted into each page manually by editors each time they create a new page.

Administrators, editors, and authors have different levels of access to change themes and edit their properties. WordPress administrators can choose from a multitude of themes that lay out the site differently and allow or disallow types of customization.