Congratulations, you have come this far and now you are ready to get stuck in and start building the main part of your site – THE CONTENT!
Here I am going to tell you how you start creating those posts. It’s actually very easy but I am going to give you a rundown off all the many features on the write post section.
To write a Wordpress post is very easy, follow these simple steps:
- Login to your Word Press administration panel
- Select Write from the navigation menu
- By default it will take you to “Write Post” page
- If you haven’t blogged before it looks very similar to your email e.g. hotmail, yahoo or gmail.
- Simple enter the title you want to call your post (or article as I like to call them) and write the content in the post box (the big white box)
- That’s it! When you are done, click Publish.
We are now going to look at the other features available to us on the “Write Post” page as I’m sure you are wondering what they all mean and asking yourself if you should be using them.
You’re Drafts
Wordpress automatically saves your posts as a draft but does not publish them. I found this out myself when my computer shut down on me and was relieved to find my post had been saved as a draft version.
You can also choose to save a draft by simply clicking on “Save” once your done.
If you have posts that’s are saved and not published, they will be displayed above the Write Post title. Simply click on the blue link to open that post and continue. When you are done you can click Publish and it will be live on your website.
Title
This is where you enter the title of your post. It’s a bit like the subject of an email. For search engine purposes I tend to make my titles catchy and interesting as to attract visitors to read them.
Tip: Try not to use the same title more than once as that will cause problems. You will notice in my permalinks that I have the id number shown for each post. It is for this purpose that I have that so it does not cause the search engines confusion.
REMEMEBR – Wordpress uses the same title for the post-slug. (we talk about this soon) If your title is too long, change the post-slug to something else otherwise search engines will think it’s spam. For example, if your title is “how to upgrade Wordpress” change it to “upgrade Wordpress” The shorter the better.
Post Options “Visual” or “Code
The Visual window is the default for writing new posts and most of the time you would use this unless you are particularly good at the technical stuff.
You may or may not see these two options in the form of tabs above the main window where you start writing the content or it may be called something different depending on what version of Wordpress you are using, for example it may be called “basic” and advanced”
Post Area
The big white box is where you enter your content, links, images and whatever else you want inside here. This is your main body just like in an email. Because it’s visual rich text editor you can highlight, format, use bullet points, add hyperlinks and so on. Unlike Blogger you can also use the “spilt post with more tag” button. This button means you can excerpt the way your posts appear on the page e.g. introductory paragraph and then continue the rest of the article on read more
Formatting Options
Formatting options can be found above the white textarea box where you write content. They are displayed as picture icons and if you use any Microsoft application you will recognize most of the symbols, i.e. bold, italic, bullet points and so on.
Upload
You can have images inside your content and can be easily inserted within the write post page. Follow the steps below:
- Click Browse my picture under the Upload section. The Choose file window will appear
- Look for your picture and click Open
- Enter a title and description and click the upload button.
- You can choose to show the picture as a full size or thumbnail and can also link the image to any file.
- Click “Send to Editor”. You can format the image to add a border, align the image or remove the border by changing the border value to a 0. To format the image you will need to click on the image to select it (you will see white square boxes around the image once selected) then click insert/edit image button on the text area formatting toolbar.
Save and Continue Editing
Below the Post text area box are three buttons – Save, Save and continue editing, and publish. If you would like to save the post to your database as a draft copy click save, if you would like to save the post but continue working on it, click Save and continue editing. When you are ready to make the post live you can hit the publish button. Once saved you will be able to see a preview of your post at the bottom of the screen.
Categories
On the left hand side of the screen you will see categories. You can add categories from here and you can select what category you want to add this post to by simply ticking the checkbox beside the category name. The uncategorized category will be checked by default each time you want to make a new post, unless you have already changed the name of that category. Check your categories are correct before publishing a post and remember that its’ not good to go back and keep changing once its already published because you will get broken links in the search engines which in turn may affect your page ranking.
Discussion
You can choose to allow comments and pings. If you want visitors to your site to post comments then make sure this is checked. Allowing Pings means that someone can post pingbacks or trackbacks to this particular post. Make sure this is also checked.
Post Password
This is quite handy because you can make a post private and there are many reasons you may want to do this and Wordpress gives you that option. Only those with the password will be able to read it. When your post is published and someone clicks on the post title, it will take them to a page where the user is required to enter a password.
Optional Excerpt
This is a new feature for me on Wordpress that came by default with the template. I didn’t really know what it was until I started using it.
When you create a post, you can set it up so that Wordpress will take a small part of that post and use it as your excerpt on the category, archive and search pages and maybe in your Feed. Wordpress decides what small part to display.
With the Optional Excerpt, though, you can create your own excerpt for each post you have written. Doing this allows you to highlight some important text from within the post, rather than the start of the post. You can also use relevant phrases and keywords.
Post Status
You will see a post status box on the right hand side of the screen. There are three options. Published, Draft, and Private. To save the post as a Draft, choose Draft. To publish the post when you click Save, then choose Publish. To keep the post private, choose Private.
Send Trackbacks To
Trackbacks are a cool feature because as an author of a blog you can leave comments on other blog sites e.g. another Wordpress blog without even visiting the blog. These are called either Pingbacks or Trackbacks. It is a way of informing other bloggers whenever they refer to a post from another site in their own post. To send trackbacks from this post, simply enter the URL or website addresses in the box. Separate multiple URLs with spaces
Post Slug
The post slug is where Wordpress will automatically create a link, if you are using Permalinks, in other words this name will be shown in your url. It’s a good idea to check your post slug before saving as changes later on can affect your Google ranking due to broken links.
Tip: check to make sure the post slug too long otherwise Google will think it’s spam, for example if your post title is “how to upgrade Word press” change your post slug to “upgrade Wordpress” You can manually change your post-slug.
Any commas, quotes, apostrophes, and other non-HTML favorable characters that you may have used in your title are removed and a dash is inserted between each word. For example if your title is “create Wordpress category”, it will be changed “create-Wordpress-category” as you post slug.
Post Timestamp
By default, the time that is saved is the current time at which you have saved your post. You can manually change this using the checkbox and change the date and time. If you’re date and time is in the future then your posts won’t appear on the site until after that date. This is good if you want to write a number of posts and set them up so each post is published automatically on that future date.
Custom Fields
Custom Fields provide a way to enhance information on your site and can change the way a post is displayed. These are mainly used by plugins, however you can easily edit the information you see in this section. I use my custom fields to insert my own Meta tags. Meta tags are a Wordpress plugin which passes information to search engines crawlers.
The Word Press Bookmarklet
At the bottom of your Write Post screen is another feature of Word Press called The Word Press Bookmarklet. All you need to do is Right click on the link and choose “Add to favorites” to create a posting shortcut. You can use it on a page you want to write about and with a simple click you get the Write Post form with the title and selected text already filled in. You can change the information you see like, change the title, select the categories, and when you are ready, choose Save as Draft, Save as private, and publish. Once you click publish your post will be live on your site for the world to see.
Note: Something you need to know is Wordpress posts a post automatically called Hello World. You can delete it. To do this go to “Manage” from the navigation menu. This will show you the last 15 posts. You can delete any post you don’t want or that are not yours.
Proceed to: How to allow and approve comments in Wordpress
Go back to:Wordpress for Dummies
This book “Wordpress for Dummies” provides you with everything you need to get up and running with WordPress. The book covers blogging basics, choosing a hosting solution or setting up a host, developing blog content, syndicating blog posts with RSS, launching a specialized blog (including podcasting, photoblogging, mobile blogging, and videoblogging), and even earning revenue.
It Includes help on every aspect of installing and using WordPress, illustrations from real-world WordPress blogs, step-by-step tutorials on key topics, and insights from bloggers who have used WordPress
