Adding a post to a WordPress site is as easy as falling off a log. You are going to love it.
The first thing to do is login with your username and password on the screen that looks like the one pictured here.
WordPress login screen
You should already have a username and password. If you don’t, talk to whoever has the admin account on your blog. If you’re one of my clients, talk to me!
If you’re not one of my clients, still talk to me!
Once you are logged in, you will be looking at the main dashboard screen as pictured here.
Click posts or uses Quick Post
You want to either click on Posts, then “Add New” under Posts, or use the Quickposts section. The Quickposts form is great for, as you might imagine, quickly adding a post to your blog, but it doesn’t allow you to choose the category that post will go into.
Most of the time this will be fine to use, and you can always change the category of the post that gets added with it later on, so Quick Post might be a good, fast option most of the time. Try it and see if it works out.
If things don’t show up where you think they should, don’t worry. Get in touch with me and we’ll get you back on track.
If you don’t like the cut of Quick Post’s jib, use the main posting screen by choosing “Add New” under the Posts section in the menu bar on the left. That will take you to a screen that looks like this.
The post window
Once here, just add your title and type your content. Getting familiar with the content editor is important to maximize the use of WordPress. It is a lot like a word processing program such as Word, only better because it produces clean HTML that won’t cause web browsers to cry.
Note:Please be careful with using Microsoft products for pasting in copy. Microsoft adds HTML code behind the scenes that causes all kinds of havoc in non-IE browsers as well as IE. I’m told that sometimes pasting the stuff you want to use into Notepad, then selecting it again and copying it a second time removes a lot of this stuff, but I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this method.
Once you have a title and some content that you are happy with, try using the Media editor to add some photos to your post. This is another great feature of WordPress that you are going to love. To get started with it, click on the little icons to the right of the words “Upload/Insert” just above the content editor.
And once that’s all done, you are done editing! Now all we need to do is select a category and then publish this bad boy.
Editing categories on the posts screen
You can see here that the Categories area, bottom right, is highlighted. You may never have to use this, but on some blogs it is useful. Notice here on the East Atlanta Kids Club blog that there is a category for Features and one for News. In their case, a new news item will go into the Features category, and then later on move into News when there is a new feature.
Different categories sometimes mean that the content is displayed different places, especially on templates that I have implemented, so look for that.
As always, if there are any further questions, do not hesitate to give me a ring at 404 492 9692 or send me an email at jim@hodgsonco.com.
We’ll get you all straightened out in no time!
