The world of navigation terms and post types

It's important to understand the basic construction of your site, and this is a good place to start. 

Your site consists of two basic things: navigation terms and post types.

Navigation terms

Navigation terms are used to build your "site map," as well as the actual navigation of your site. Imagine the navigation structure like folders (sometimes with folders nested in them). You can think of the posts as the "files" you put in the folders. (Another analogy we like to use: imagine that your navigation terms are the aisles of your grocery store, and the posts are the actual groceries in those aisles.) One of the reasons the second analogy works so well is this: your posts can appear in more than one navigation term, or area. Similar to how you may find bananas in the fruit aisle of your grocery store, and also at the end of the cereal aisle. (Except in the case of your website, it's really one banana appearing in both places!)

On  many sites, only the top level navigation terms show (as in the examples here). On other sites, there are sub navigation term menus that appear when you hover over the main navigation terms, showing the terms or "folders" within.

Here's an example of a simple sitemap / navigation structure:

And here is the navigation bar that was built based upon those navigation terms. You'll notice only the main navigation terms (About Us, Portfolio, All the News, Get in Contact, and Resources) show in this implementation:

One of the most powerful things about the Digital Deployment system is that you have the power to edit and rearrange your navigation structure instantly, whenever you need to. Anyone with administrative access to the site can make those changes.

Posts and post types

The next thing to understand are posts. Posts can be thought of as individual pieces of content that you then "tag" to navigation terms to make them display. We use a variety of post types to make your content appear in an organized, easy to understand fashion, and different post types may behave a bit differently. Examples of post types might include Press Releases, Events, Blog posts, etc. 

We can make different post types appear in different locations (zones), as well as making them appear a bit distinctly from one another. In the example below, you'll see that the Overview post type titled "About Digital Deployment" appears at the top of the page, shows the full body text, and looks a bit different than the other posts below it on the page. To the right, the posts "The 8-Phase Process" and "Contact us" are posts of a type we call Pods - and they only show an image, title and subtitle. They typically link to a full post elsewhere, and are just designed to be used as little ads of a sort, to feature something you'd like to call attention to. 

One of the best things about post types is your ability to change a post from one type to another if you change your mind. For example, you may create something as a Pod and then decide it really should be the Overview of the landing page instead. It's a simple thing to change, and it will automatically appear as an Overview should once saved - even moving into the proper place on the page. 

There is much more information on all of this in the "All about Posts" and "All about Navigation" sections, but this should serve as a good introduction.