Use Posts to Organize Your WordPress Website

Municipalities need a website to keep their residents up to date and informed. Believe it or not, there is a right way and a wrong way to organize the content on your government website.

Avoid the wall of text

Your readers’ time is valuable. When they visit your site, they want to find the information for which they are looking as quickly as possible. If they arrive to your site to a giant block of text, they will be intimidated.

Some may stay and dig to find what they are looking for. But, most will just leave. Website users skim. They skim your content to see what it is they’d like to read more about. When something strikes their fancy, they will often read deeper.

Long paragraphs, jumbled announcements, and wide columns of text do not work with how visitors use the web.

Do not use H-Tags to format your pages

You must use H-tags when creating content for your website. However, they should not be used to format your site. This is what CSS is for.

H-tags are important, especially for those visitors using a screen reader. They denote the heirachy of importance of each page of your site. H-1 is the most important. H-2 is used for subheadings and is given less importance than H-1. This continues on through H-6.

When you use H-tags for all of the content on your site, the reader cannot tell what is important. Remember, when everything is important, nothing is important.

a post that uses all H3 tags
In this example, not only did we format the text in all caps, all of the announcements are on one page using the H-3 tag.

Even if you use H-tags properly, if there are a lot of announcements, a reader may not scroll to read everything. This example is decidedly better than the last. But there is an even better way to organize your content.

post uses H-tags properly, but all announcements are on the same page
In this example, the announcements use H-tags correctly but are all on one page.

Use posts to organize news, announcements, and events

Posts are a great tool to organize your content in an easy-to-scan way. The reader can see the title and the topic, and then decide if they’d like to learn more by clicking through to the content.

Here are some great features about posts:

  • You can schedule them ahead of time.
  • You can expire them.
  • They are easy to scan.
  • They are easy to organize using categories and tags.
  • If you use featured images, they are more interesting to look at.
announcement organized in posts, 6 posts here with a "more news" button
In this example, the announcements are organized in posts with the option to read more.

It is important to note that even organizing your content in this way, people are unlikely to click through to “more news”. Make sure that you have enough announcements on your homepage to display relevant and timely information, but not so many as to overwhelm the user.


Looking for a way to organize your documents, meeting minutes, ordinances, forms, and more? Functional Gov makes it easy to upload documents with ease and consistency.

https://coursevector.com/functional-gov-document-management/


There is a time and a place for a long article. However, your homepage is not it. When someone arrives at your site, they expect to find what they are looking for quickly. Make sure that your content is organized for a smooth user experience.

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