Utilizing the drafts feature should prevent any need for creating place holder pages. Anything saved as a draft will not show up to the public. The purpose is to allow a page to be worked on and saved without actually posting it, or to allow the approval of content before the page goes live.

There is an extremely important reason why you don’t want to publish blank pages…the website software is integrated with Google search which means your site is going to be far more visible on the internet than previously. You do not want to be indexing blank pages or pages with duplicate information or you can be penalized by Google and your site pushed down in relative searches.

Having up to date, relevant content is extremely important, as well as clear and concise copy that is written for the web.

The other reason for not creating temporary pages is because of “permalinks”. WordPress creates links based on the title of your page or post. If you create a “Contact Us” page, it will name the page

http://schools.stlucie.k12.fl.us/yourschool/contact-us

If you later decide you don’t like that page and create another one, it will be named

http://schools.stlucie.k12.fl.us/yourschool/contact-us-2

This can be avoided by editing the original page rather than deleting and creating a new one. Versions of pages are saved as well, and this gets lost when the page is deleted.