WordPress Highlight: Posts Part 1

Content is king.  As any of us might know, without content, your site is nothing more than a template.  It’s a plain white room without paint, decorations, or anything to give it any life.  And, surprise, very few people want to sit in a white room for more than a few seconds before leaving — and that’s true of a content-less site, too.

So, what’s the best way to add content?  Post!  Specifically, let’s talk about posting in a WordPress site.  It’s easy, truth-be-told, but that doesn’t mean you know about everything you can do with a post or that you’re even making the most of them.  As such, I decided to give you a rundown of posts and I recommend you open up a new tab in your WordPress Admin Panel so you can follow along easily.

Bold, Italics, and so much more.

Let’s start by clicking add new.  You’re not actually going to add a new one but this is just so you can see the post screen.  Let’s start at the top.   See that little dropdown menu that (probably) says paragraph?  That allows you to easily change the font size/style to some preset ones.  A good example is my title you see.  That’s Heading 3 size and, to me, is perfect for sectioning off my posts.  Next, we’ve got Bold and Italics… I’m pretty sure you know what those are but if not, just look at my own example on the words.

After that, we come to lists.  Let’s make a list of these lists.

  • Bulleted gives you a bullet point list.
  • You can see how this works, right?
  1. While numbered will number your list.
  2. It’s pretty self-explanatory, really.

Next, we come to Blockquote.  To put it simply, it’s used to differentiate something I might say from something written I am copying from a book or quoting from someone.  For instance, this excerpt comes from a novel I wrote called The Drifter.

My fingers reached the button to the elevator quickly; I was eager to see my new home.  The doors dinged open moments later, and I entered, staring at the buttons numbered two through thirty-five.

As you can see, it brings a certain focus to the text as well as keeping it distinctly separate from my own words.

Our next journey takes us to the align bars.  You can alight the text to the left.

Or into the middle of the page.

Or to the right.

After that, we come to insert/edit link.  This is pretty simple — you just click the button and paste the link inside.  You can also highlight text first if you want to paste the link inside a word.

The read more button makes it so you…Have to click to read the rest of the story.

Lastly, we come to proofreading, add contact form, and the toolbar toggles.  Proofreading does exactly what you expect — it looks for errors in your post automatically.  Add contact form lets you easily and quickly create a form for people to contact you with.  It’s mostly used for questions, comments, or contests.  The Toolbar Toggles gives you a few more options for changing your text colors, adding strike through or straight lines, indenting pages, and a few special characters you can add.

These are all pretty simple and varied once you get the hang of it and, hopefully with my help, you’ll have it pretty well down now.  Next time, we’ll talk about the right side and bottom of the screen, how to use categories to your advantage, and formating.

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