Basic WordPress training: Creating posts
Although posts and pages serve very different purposes on your WordPress site, the way they are created has many similarities. In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at creating a post.
[ezcol_1quarter]To create a post, click Posts>Add New.
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Enter a title. This will appear at the top of your post and will also be used in your blog stream on your Blog page for visitors to click on to be taken to the full post. It’s also what will show up in search engine results, so keep in mind that the title should represent what the subject of the post is when taken out of the context of your site.
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Once you enter a title, a new line will appear underneath the title. WordPress has generated the URL or the permalink for this post; this is the address of this post – where it appears on the internet and where other sites can link to.
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You have the power to edit the link if you feel the URL is too long, but make sure you do this at the start. It’s unadvisable to edit the URL once the post has been published as any links to the post will be broken. To do this, click ‘Edit’, change the text, and click ‘OK’.
So now you’re ready to create the body of your post. The post editor area works very much like a word-processing programme.
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The Toolbar
The toolbar gives us various options to format the text of our post.
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To the right you’ll see 2 mode-options: Visual and Text. The Text mode is for entering HTML and is more the domain of professional web developers. For the beginner, I would advise sticking in Visual mode as you’ll be able to see the changes you make as you make them and the HTML will be automatically generated for you.
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So, once you’ve entered the text for you blog post, you’ll want to customise it so it looks great and behaves the way you’d like it to. This is where the toolbar at the top of the post editor comes into play.
You may only see one line of icons in the toolbar. If this is the case, the first thing you’ll want to do is click the Show/Hide Kitchen Sink icon to reveal all the options available to you.
Now let’s go through some of the main controls in the toolbar.
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Adding a link
It’s often very useful to link to related material on your own site or an external site.
1. Highlight the text that you want to use as a clickable link.
2. Click on the Link icon in the toolbar.
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3. In the pop-up box either type or paste your link into the URL field.
4. In the Title field you can add whatever text you’d like to appear when visitors hover over the link.
5. Choose if you want the link to open in a new window or tab by checking the box. It is standard practise to choose this option if you are linking to an external web-page (ie. One that is not on your own site).
6. Click ‘Add link’.
HANDY SHORTCUT: If linking to another page on your own site, simply click on ‘Link to existing content’ and a list of your previous posts and pages will appear for you to choose from. You can also use the ‘Search’ box to find previous content if the list is super-long.
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Basic formatting options
To format any text, simply highlight it and click the appropriate icon in the toolbar. The first three icons in the top row are Bold, Italic and Strike-through.
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Next you have the options to create a bulleted or numbered list.
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The next icon allows you to create a block-quote (used for quotations from external sources).
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Then the standard options for how your text is aligned (left, centred or right).
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Moving on to the second row:
It’s a good idea to break your post up with headings and sub-headings. HTML allows for 6 variations of sizes for headings (H1-H6). H1 is the largest and H6 is the smallest. The actual size of these headings will be determined by the theme you are using. Try not to use more than 3 different sizes in any one post as it becomes messy and unreadable.
Text in the post-editor is generated as standard paragraph text by default. To add a heading, simply highlight the heading-text and choose your desired heading size from the dropdown Format menu. Note that H1 will automatically be used for the main post title so it would make sense for sub-headings in the main body to be H2.
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The next options along allow you to underline text:
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Justify the text:
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And change the colour of the text:
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Using the Insert More tag
On your blog stream pages (such as your Blog page or Category pages), depending on the theme you are using, usually only an extract of each post will be shown. It is within your power to dictate how much of the text is previewed on these pages.
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To do this you can use the Insert More tag.
Simply click at the end of the introductory text (whatever text you would like to appear in the extract) and click on the Insert More icon.
This will not be visible in the main post but will show a ‘Read More’ link underneath the extract on any blog stream pages.
Now we have the most useful functions of the toolbar covered. Once you’ve got the text of your post looking great, what next?
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Putting your posts in categories
In order for your blog to stay organised, it’s advisable that each post is categorised.
On the right-hand side of the page you’ll see the Category box. If you don’t assign the post to a category, WordPress will automatically categorise it as ‘Uncategorised’ or whatever you choose as your default category (more about that later).
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If this is your first blog post, you may not see any options in the Category box, except ‘Uncategorised’. Simply click ‘Add New Category’ and create a pertinent title for the category. If you were an artist writing a blog post about the impact of your textile art on the environment, you might create a category entitled ‘Textiles in society’.
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Using tags
Whereas categorising your posts is compulsory, tags are completely optional and are simply a different way of organising the content on your site. Tags can be helpful for finding related posts. They are usually descriptive words or phrases relating to the content of the post. You can add tags by typing them in to the Tags field separating them with commas and clicking Add.
We’ll go into more detail about categories and tags later.
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Ready to publish?
To check how the post will actually look on your live site, click Preview in the top right hand corner of the page. This will take you to a preview of your post; it isn’t live on the site yet, so nobody will be able to view it except you.
You will probably want to spruce up your post with a few images or other media (like videos); we’ll cover adding media in detail in another tutorial.
Once you are happy with how the post looks, you have a few options:
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Save it as a draft: If you’re not ready to publish it and feel you’d like to do some further editing at a later date, click Save Draft. This will be saved to your Posts but won’t be published on your live site yet.
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Publish immediately: If you are ready to go, simply click Publish. The post will then be available for visitors to read via your Blog page and any Category pages under which it is listed.
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Schedule for later: If you have a specific content-plan and publish posts every Monday morning for example, click on the Edit link next to Publish Immediately and enter the time and date of when you’d like the post to go live. Then click ‘Schedule’.
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Tips for creating posts
Beware of cutting and pasting from Microsoft Word: hidden code is often embedded in these documents and can make your page behave in peculiar ways. To avoid this, click on the ‘W’ button in the second line of the toolbar in the post editor and paste your text into the pop-up that appears. This will strip away the hidden code and allow you to format it afresh in WordPress.
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Pasting HTML: If you are given HTML code from an external source, such as to embed a video from Youtube, you won’t want to paste this code into the visual editor. Instead, you’ll need to switch over to the Text editor. Once you’re in there, find the place in your post that you’d like the video to appear and paste the appropriate code. When you switch back over to the visual editor, you’ll see a block where the video will appear on your live site: the video itself won’t actually appear in the visual editor. If you were to paste the HTML into the visual editor, then the video wouldn’t appear on the live post; instead the viewer would see the HTML code itself.
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Using Distraction Free Mode: A great way of writing a post, without worrying about advanced formatting (although basic formatting is possible) and concentrating completely on the words you are composing is to switch over to Distraction Free Mode. If you are finding the amount of WordPress options a little overwhelming, this mode will make the rest of WordPress disappear temporarily and present you with a much cleaner workspace. To do this, click on the four-way cursor in the top line of the toolbar.
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To exit Distraction Free Mode, click ‘Exit Full Screen’.
So now you know your way around the Post editor, let’s take a look at the variations when creating a page.
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