Writing your first post
Writing a post in Wordpress is simple. Wordpress uses a rich text editor which is essentially like a word processor and has various options such as bolding, italics, underlining, indenting etc. The steps involved in writing a post are as follows:
1. Adding a new post
Click on ‘Add New’ posts on the left hand side [...]
Writing a post in Wordpress is simple. Wordpress uses a rich text editor which is essentially like a word processor and has various options such as bolding, italics, underlining, indenting etc. The steps involved in writing a post are as follows:
1. Adding a new post
Click on ‘Add New’ posts on the left hand side of your dashboard as shown below.
2. Enter a title for your post
This should accurately reflect the content you are writing about in your post. For example, this post is called ‘Your First Post’ which is apt.
3. Write content
This is done in the body of the post (the big white space below the title). You can write what you want but I recommend that you BOLD any titles as this helps identify the content as important and apparently can help your SEO (search engine optimization).
4. Adding an image
To add an image is easy and simply involves clicking on the image icon and then choosing a file to upload. Usually a JPEG or a GIF is the best way to go.
5. Adding video to your blog
Fortunately with Wordpress always evolving, this has become very easy to do. All you have to do is press the ‘Insert/Edit Embedded Media’ and then select your video type and your file. The disadvantage to adding your own video is that it puts a load on your server and can be slower to load, so the user experience may not be so good.
A good alternative is to simply embed a YouTube video. To do this you click on the HTML button (on the right hand side of the Visual tab) and then insert the code.
After you click on Insert/Edit Embedded Media icon above, you will see the window below. Click on General and then insert the code into the File/Url box as shown below. Then your video will appear! To grab this video code from YouTube you simply copy the text which says ‘Embed’ and paste it as below.
Another way to add a video is to click on the icon below
The next screen will look like this (see below). First, Click on the ‘From URL’ link and then go to YouTube and select the ‘Embed Code’ option. Copy this code by doing Ctrl + C or going to edit and copy and then past that code as shown below. Then simply click on ‘Insert into Post’.
6. The ‘More’ button
When you write a post and you don’t want the entire post to display (i.e. an excerpt), you can simply click on the ‘Insert more tag‘ as shown below. Just select the spot you want to insert it and press it. This is very useful and I use it for many of my posts.
Basically, all text above this will display and all text below it will only display when users click on the full post.
7. Saving your post as a draft or publishing it
When you save a post, if you aren’t quite ready to announce it to the world you can save it as a draft. This means you can access it anytime and keep editing it until you are happy with it. If you Publish a post you can also save it as a draft if you change your mind, but try not to do this if possible because once it is published and it is indexed by google then users may get an error when they look for that page. If your site isn’t well known and google doesn’t index it very often then you are probably okay. When you Publish a post, it means it will display on your site and it also means ‘hopefully’ google will index your site and this will be one of the pages it indexes.
8. Deleting your post
If you want to delete your post it’s easy to do from the admin panel. When you click on POSTS in your sidebar there are 4 options – edit/quick edit/delete/view. Click in the checkbox and select which one you want.
