Posts, Pages and navigating inside your blog

This article explains Posts, Pages, and some ways that they can be used to help people move around inside your blog.

Overview:
Since Google introduced the new Pages feature, there has been a lot of confusion about Posts, Pages, Sub-pages, and how to categorise things.

This isn't helped by a lot of Blogger's own documentation, written before the Pages feature was introduced, which used the term "pages" to refer to a collection of Posts.

This article explains the difference, and looks at when each type of item should be used.

Pages vs Posts

A Post is the basic unit of information that you publish in Blogger. Each post has a post-date, and this date is often the main tool for navigating around your blog.

On the surface, a Page is similar to a Post. But really, they are quite different, and should be used for different things.

Pages are meant for static content that doesn't change often. This is content that supports your main content, which is in your posts. Because of this, Pages:

Cannot be set as your home page
Cannot be navigated to from the Newer/Older posts links
Don't have labels,
Can only be navigated to from the Pages gadget - cannot be navigated to from the Labels gadget
Are not included in RSS feeds,
Are not included when you export your blog contents,

Ideally, you should only edit your Pages very rarely.

Navigating around a Blog

When the Pages gadget is displayed as a horizontal bar, it looks like a menu bar.

This makes many people think that Pages are the main way of navigating around a Blog. This wasn't true, initially, but recent changes to the Pages gadget have made it more helpful. That said it's not the only - or best, IMHO - way to get your users navigate.

The tools that Blogger provides for navigating around a blog are:

The Labels gadget (to list posts by category) - you can use it to make it seem like you have put your posts into "pages"
The Archives gadget (to go directly to a post by date)
The Newer/Older posts links (to go through the blog one screen at a time)

The Linked List gadget can also be used for navigation, provided you set it up with links to Posts in your blog.

And you can put links between individual Posts using regular hyperlinks (select the text, cick the Link item in the toolbar, put in the URL of the post that you are linking to).

The Pages gadget is not intended for navigating through most of the contents your blog - it is only useful for getting directly to reference information that isn't stored in the same sequence that your main blog contents are.