This WordPress beginner tutorial shows you how to post to your wordpress blog. It’s one of the longer tutorials we’ve written for WordPress and rightfully so. There’s a lot of tools you can use. If your reading this tutorial and have questions that aren’t answered in this post feel free to post in the comment section below. That helps everyone!
Let’s get started.
Posts are typically for blogging or creating archives of content.
Step 1. Logging in.
To login to your site go to http://yoursite.com/wp-admin.
You’ll be presented with a request for a name and password. Enter them to gain access to the Dashboard of your site. (the dashboard is were changes to your site are made.)
Step 2. Adding a new post.
First you must specify that you’d like to add a new post. You can do so by clicking the ‘Add New’ button in the post row of the left sidebar. (shown to the right)
step 3. Navigating the post window
The post area is divided up into 3 primary sections. More sections and options are available based on the theme you are using and the level of complexity your site requires. (a lot of options does not necessarily mean it’s a better theme.)
The Primary Areas Are:
- The Title Area
- The Content area
- The Right Sidebar tools
WordPress has done a very good job making these sections easy to understand and easy to use.
Step 3. Title and Content Area
I combined these two areas because the title area is pretty simple. The title area requires a title. That’s it, done with the title.
The Content area is a little more hefty. This is the primary area you will use when writing your blog posts. At the top of it you’ll see a significant amount of bells and whistles. These accomplish an extremely wide variety of things.
Upload and Insert – This area is used for uploading pictures. This area allows you to upload photos, videos, music, and alternate media (like Flash)
The Next part to look at is to the right. The Visual / HTML tabs. These tabs toggle the content that you add from a normal text edit viewing style to a HTML coded scenario.
The HTML window is not needed if you are unfamiliar with HTML. If you aren’t familiar with HTML skip the HTML section of this tutorial.
**** HTML INFO *****
For example if I typed:
“This is bold type.” – The visual window would show it just like that.
If I then switched over to the HTML window it’d look like this – <b>”this is bold type.”</b>
That’s because it’s also displaying the computer code that makes it look bold. Unless you are savvy with HTML that window is non necessary at all.
If you’d like to learn more about HTML coding you can visit w3C.org. It’s full of stuff to learn.
**** END OF HTML INFO ****
Next we’ve got the toolbar. It looks very similar to Mac Pages or Microsoft Word so you’ll most likely know what a few of them do. If you don’t feel free to comment with a request for me to add a detailed description and I will.
Using the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) tools and content window allow you to combine images and text for your post sections of your site. Now we will go over how to display that information using the publish tools in the right sidebar.
Step 4. The Right Sidebar Tools
The Right Sidebar will vary depending on what type of tools your theme uses. Typically there are several areas they are the:
- Publish area – this allows to:
- Save a draft which means that you can save your blogging progress without presenting it online.
- Preview your progress from a front-end perspective – Typically you click ‘save draft’ and then preview to see how it looks so far.
- Toggle the visibility – Toggle visibility allows you to make your post private, public, or password protected. You can also make the post a sticky. this allows it to be the first post shown in the list of blog posts on the homepage or blog section.
- Publish Immediately Section – This allows you to post-date a post. So you could potentially create 10 blog posts in 1 day and have them post throughout the next 10 days by referencing future dates. Alternately you can also post from a past date if needed.
- Category Section – This section is simpler. It allows you to create categories on the fly and also reference past used categories. It’s how you keep your posts organized. A parent category is a category that holds other categories. In the image you can see that ‘blog’ is a parent category of five different posts.
- Post tags (not shown) - Tags provide a useful way to group related posts together, and to quickly tell readers what a post is about. Tags also make it easier for people to find your content. Tags are similar to, but more specific than, categories. The use of tags is completely optional. To add them just type them in the text blog and make sure they are comma separated.
- Featured Image Section – Depending on the theme your using you may have a featured image tab. This allows you to pick an image from your computer or media library that is used as your featured post image. Typically there are necessary size requirements for this image depending on your specific site.
