Creating a Basic Wordpress Post
Item 2: Creating a Basic Wordpress Post
Once you’ve logged in to Wordpress, click on the “Write” tab along the the top. This will take you to the “Write Post” screen where you can create an original post.
There are basically 4 parts to each post…
1. Post Body - Most people will enter their post with the “Visual” tab clicked on. However, if you know a bit of html code - such as how to create a hyperlink using html - you might want to click on the HTML tab over on the right side of the form and do it that way.
Either way, it is often best to create your post in a Notepad or Google Docs document beforehand. That way you’ll have a clear text version of it that you can use in different places later.
However, you definitely should not copy from a MS Word or Adobe Acrobat document right into Wordpress. Doing that will almost always bring in odd characters and formatting instructions - things such as curly quote marks, hyphens, copyright and registered symbols that tend to create problems in Wordpress. If you want to bring material in from a MS Word or an Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) doc, then copy it first into Notepad or Google Docs, clean up the oddball characters, and then copy it into Wordpress.
Of course you can always create your post right in Wordpress (like I am doing right now), but if you are bringing in text from an external source, clean it up as described above, then just copy it from the original document and paste it into the form.
You can also copy text right from web pages and paste it into the “visual” form. Generally this will bring in some of the formatting correctly, and almost always it will bring in the links. But complicated formatting from web pages will most likely not reproduce correctly because your are not bringing the formatting rules in with the copy and paste operation. We recommend copying and pasting only from very simple pages. If you want more complicated pages it is best to construct the html document in an html editor and import the completed html pages. Just bear in mind that the vast majority of blog pages are simple text with very limited formatting, and that’s what we recommend you do as well.
2. Post Title - This goes in the Title field at the top of the post. Often it is best to create your title after the post is completed. Titles are very important for SEO purposes, because it is what the search engines generally assume your article is about. So if you care about how the search engines index your posts, you should include an important keyword near the beginning of the title, and don’t make it more than 6 or 7 words long.
3. Categories - The blog administrator has set up “categories” to help organize posts according to subject matter. Choose the most appropriate category, or if there isn’t one, choose “General” or “Uncategorized”. It is often difficult to find just the right category for your posts, but don’t worry too much about it. Categories are not as important as “tags” (discussed in the next point).
4. Tags - These are generally keywords that you (the author) enter to give the blog search tools and the Search Engines like Google an idea what your post is about. For example, if your post is about “building dog houses”, you should tag it with whatever words you think a person might look for when searching for information on this topic. You would probably use tags such as: “dog houses, pet houses, pets, dogs…” and anything else you think is relevant. Tags can be single words or strings of words (phrases), and should be separated by a comma.
Formatting Tools
Along the top of the “Write Post” form are a series of buttons. These will let you automatically apply basic formatting to specific blocks of text without having to know any html code. For instance, you can make a selected block of text bold, italic, struckthru. You can add bullets, create a numbered list, and create a “block quote” which is often used to quote someone else in an extensive way. Experiment with these different settings, but keep in mind that, generally, the simpler you post, the better.
Of course, if you know html, you can also apply formatting by going to the HTML view and adding the html code.
