Skills You Can Learn for Yourself:
How to Create and Edit a Post in WordPress
Some of our clients prefer the option to create and edit their own posts in WordPress rather than sending content for us to log on their behalf. If you wish to take a more hands-on approach to your website, here is a resource for you to learn from or refresh yourself with. We’re always here to help.
Log into your WordPress account. Type in your username and password (may have received this from us if we set up your site for you and you requested one, or you may have created one prior to hiring us).
Click on ‘Posts‘ in the left menu.
Click ‘Add Post’ to create a new Post (or find a previous one to edit in the list).
Title your post. This will effect your URL as well so pay attention to where it says “Permalink” followed by a URL (there is a section that’s editable if you choose to do so). URLs and Post Titles should be as succinctly clarifying as possible.
Add Media (Photos, videos, etc.) to add images, videos, audio, or other files, click on ‘Add Media’.
Enter the content you wish to include. WordPress divides its sections of texts into paragraphs. If you simply press the enter key, it will start a new paragraph. These will automatically be spaced apart. If you would like to keep text in the same paragraph section without creating a space, hold down shift when you press return/Enter.
Format Style in the “paragraph” dropdown, you can change the size or heading of the text (use to visually break up content).
Paragraph is regular text.
Heading 1 is for important titles, like the title of your post.
Heading 2 is slightly smaller, and can be used to help title different sections of the post.
Heading 3 is smaller, and so on.
Paste as plain text to paste the text copied on your clipboard into the editor as plain text, without any previous formatting or styles attached.
Clear Formatting if you detect strange codes altering your formatting, or you can’t get rid of some setting (often when you paste text from a website), this button will get rid of any text styles and keep only the words.
Keep in mind that within each paragraph, you can only have one heading style. So if you want to separate a section title from the normal text, you will need to make them separate paragraphs.
Editing the Post:
Visual tab shows you the text editor in a “What You See is What You Get” way, which means that what your post looks like in the Visual text editor is what it will look like once it’s published.
Available text edits: Bold, Italicize, Underline, Strikethrough, Bullet text (for unordered lists) or Number text (for ordered lists), align content (left, centered or right), Insert/Edit Link or Unlink, Justify text (prevents uneven edges), change text color, find Special Characters, Outdent or Indent
Available special text edits:
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- Block quotes are for chunks of text that you want to stand alone, usually a quote or important note. Simply select the text you want to display as a block quote and click the block quote button.
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- Horizontal Line
- ‘Read More‘ Break is great for long posts and add a ‘Read More‘ page break so that your post extends when visitors click ‘Read More’. Place your cursor where you’d like the break: content above will be visible, and content below will be visible to readers after clicking ‘Read More’.
Text tab shows you the HTML code of your context. If you know how to do basic coding, you can customize much more in your post. Otherwise, stick with the Visual tab.
If you prefer for us to handle all of your site’s updates, not only the background technical ones but also the content-based, we are happy to handle that for you. Please send us any images and text, without formatting (paragraphs as separation rather than formatted indentations or bullet-points, etc).