Adding Pages and Posts

 

Now you’re ready to start adding pages and posts to your WordPress blog. As we discussed earlier, pages are generally static. They remain in the order that you place them in. You would use pages for things like your Privacy Statment, Terms of Use, Disclaimer, and About Me information. You would also use them for things that you never want to change the order of, such as the steps of this WordPress tutorial.

Blog Posts, on the other hand, are a different story. Posts are meant to keep people up to date on what your site is about. Think of a news website. You don’t want to read old news first. Posts are for ‘blogging’, writing about what’s new. Your most recent Posts will appear first.

Adding a Post

Let’s start with adding a Post. Just add a few words to it for now. You can go back and edit or delete it later. In your Dashboard, find Posts > Add new. Click on the down arrow to expand the menu if you need to.

Here you will see a very basic word processor. The first thing that you want to do is to add your title. Think about keywords every time that you write a title for both pages and posts and use them in your title. If you’re title is fairly long, you can change the URL to that page by changing what is called the Permalink. You’ll see an option for this right below the box that you type your title in. Just click on the word Edit and type in a shorter URL. For instance, if your title is Yesterday I Went to The Beach With My Best Friend Wendy, you could type in

beach trip (lower case letters)

as your new Permalink. You don’t need to enter the dashes in between the words. WordPress will do it for you. Just click on OK when you’re don’t typing your new Permalink.

Now you’re ready to start writing your post. First check and make sure that you are in Visual mode, not HTML mode. There’s a tab at the very to right hand corner of the text editing box that allows you to switch modes.

If you’re not sure what all of the icons above the text editing box are for, just hover over the icon and WordPress will tell you what they’re for. Let’s cover some of the basic things you’ll be doing when writing posts and pages.

Text Style

The theme that you’re using probably has some test styling programmed right into it. The style “paragraph” is obviously for paragraphs. You there is also Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.. These choices aren’t simply for the style of the text. Search engines look for these as well. Heading 1 will be seen by search engines as a class called H1, Heading 2 as H2 and so forth.

Heading 1 is for the title of your post, so don’t use it in the body of your text. The higher the number, the smaller the text gets. Any decent theme will have programmed in styling for H2, H3, etc.. Different sizes, and some may have a different colored font, etc.. This is called CSS, or cascading style sheets. In the olden days, CSS wasn’t around and you had to manually change the size and color of subtitles, etc.. This took a lot longer, and often wasn’t uniform throughout the website. Then came CSS… use it!

To change the style of a line of text, such as a sub heading, just place your cursor on the line and choose your class (header 2, etc.). The entire line will change for you.

If you want to change some text to bold, hi-light the text with your cursor and click on button for the letter B that you see in the word processor, and so forth.

How to Add Pictures to Your WordPress Pages and Posts

Resolution, dimensions, file size and naming your pictures

When you add pictures to any website, the resolution only needs to be 72 dpi (dots per inch) and you should edit it to be at least close to the size that you want it to be on the page/post. Having photos at a higher resolution and large dimensions means that the file size will be larger than it needs to be. You want file sizes to be as small as you can make them because this makes the page load faster in the web browser. If you don’t have a image editor, don’t worry. There are plenty of free editors that you can use.

When you name your files, you should name it something that describes the picture. For instance, if you upload a picture of a a poodle being groomed, you should name the file something like grooming_poodles, complete with the lines in the file name, not dashes. You should keep all letters in lowercase and the description short.

Let’s Add a Photo

To add a photo to Page or to your Post, place the cursor where you want the photo to go. You then click on the Add an Image icon, which is the first icon over the text editing box, next to the words Upload/Insert and above the rows of icons.

Now you can either upload a picture that you want to use, use one from that you have located on another site, or from pictures that you have already uploaded previously.

Go ahead and upload a picture from your computer. To do this, click on the the button that says Select Files. This will allow you to browse the files on your computer and find the picture that you want. Once you find it, click on it and click the Open button. On the next screen click on the Upload button.

Once the picture has finished uploading, you will see a form that you can fill out. You don’t necessarily need to fill out every line. Here are some tips:

Making Images SEO Friendly and Accessible to People With Special Needs

When you saved your picture and named something that describes the picture, you’ve made it more SEO friendly.

Image Title

The Title field will tell the browser what text to display when someone puts their mouse over the image.

Alternative (ALT) Text

The next form field that you should fill out is the Alternate (ALT) Text. An exception to this is if the picture is simply decorative, like an icon. Browsers that don’t support images will show the ALT text in place of the picture, and for people who have special software that read what’s in the browser, the reader will read them the ALT text.

Also, by naming your pictures like this and adding the ALT text, your pictures have the ability to appear in search engine results. If you’ve ever searched Google, you’ll notice a little menu at the top of the search results page. One of the links is called Images. It searches images with the keywords that a person has entered.

You could also add a Caption if you would like words to appear under the picture. A link URL can be added if you would like to link the picture to another website, etc..

If you want text wrap around the picture, choose Left or Right alignment. If you’d like it to appear in the center, choose Center. You can also choose to change the size.

Check it out – the picture below has the file name, title, ALT text and caption: WordPress Dashboard. Click on the picture for a larger view:

Once you’re finished filling out the form, click on the Insert into Post button.

If you would like to edit your picture – change the alignment, size, ALT text, etc., this can be done. Just click on the picture and then look for the icons that appear on the left. The first is to edit your picture, the second is to delete it. If you find that the picture was just a little too large, you can edit it and choose to resize it to 90%, 80%, etc.

If you added a URL so that when clicked, the picture linked to different website, you can opt to have it open in a new window. You would click on the edit icon and go to the advanced settings. Down at the bottom of that screen you’ll see a check box for this feature.

Once you’ve made your changes, click on the Update button at the bottom of the window.

Post Category

After you have written your post, you will add it to one or more categories. Back when you changed your WordPress settings, you may have chosen to have posts go into a particular category by default. You can change the category for a post. In the left hand column you will see any categories that you have already created. If you need a new one, just click on the ‘add new category’ link, give it a name and save it.

Post Tags

You can now assign tags to your post. You can choose from a list of any tags that you have already used, or add more.

If you’ve installed a plugin for Search Engine Optimization, you should scroll down the page a bit and there should be a SEO form for you to fill out. Generally it will ask for a Title, Description, etc.. By filling in this form, you’re telling search engines that crawl your site to use this title and description. If you don’t have a plugin installed, the search engines will simply use the title of your post with the first couple of lines of text. It’s good to have a plugin, in my opinion. Why? Because the first few lines of text may not contain keywords that you want the search engine to pick up on.

Custom Fields

On the page for adding a post you will also see a spot for Custom Fields. A plugin may have come with custom fields (some SEO plugins have you add the title and description using custom fields) and some templates come with custom fields. Template custom fields may be a thumbnail of a photo that will appear next to your post.

Pingbacks and Comments

You’ll also choose whether or not you want to allow pingbacks or comments for this particular post.

Other Fields to Fill Out or Choices to Make

Check to see if your template or any plugins that you’ve installed have any other things for you to fill out or to choose. Some templates come with different page/post types. These could be an option to have a full width page (leaving out the widgets on left and right), some may have a custom login page, etc.

Once you’ve finished your post, you can choose to save the draft, choose a date for it to be published, or publish it right away. You’ll find these options way back up in the right hand corner.

FYI: WordPress automatically saves your pages and posts once in awhile. If you’re in the Edit Post Edit Page screen, scroll way down to the bottom and you will see all the times that WordPress has saved it for you.