So, we’ve talked about the options, tabs, and buttons up at the top of a post here. Now, let’s talk about the right side of your “post” screen.
Publish
The first section on the right side of your screen is the “publish” section. It’s pretty straight forward but there are a couple important things to help out with. Let’s start from the top. Save Draft does just that. It saves your draft. Preview lets you see what the post will look like when it’s posted, which is particularly helpful when playing around with image sizes, fonts, etc.
Next, we come to the status area. With status you can decide whether you’re still drafting the blog or change it to pending review. This is useful for people writing blogs that need approval from someone before going out. After status is visibility. You can select public (everyone can see it), password protected (users need a password to access it), and private (accessed only to select users). After visibility comes a publish calendar. With this you can put in exactly the time and date you want your post published.
Trailing at the end of that box are the Move to Trash and Publish buttons. The first will delete your post permanently while the other will post it for all the world to see.
Format
Formatting is always important when it comes to content creation and there are a lot of options for formatting so I’ll briefly describe each one.
Standard — It’s your most versatile post type and the one you see here now. It can have almost anything in it and is just very useful all around.
Aside — An aside is like an extra note, story, or addition. It’s good for when you want to include a little extra information that doesn’t quite fit the normal blog post.
Image — It’s best used to display a single image on a page.
Video — Usually, the video format will contain a single video embedded and played directly in the post.
Quote — Reserved for when the user just wants to share a quote which doesn’t particularly fit within a standard post.
Link — It’s exactly what it sounds like. When you don’t want to post anything more than a link, use this.
Gallery — Gallery lets you add multiple images and even multiple galleries to a single post. Got a bunch of vacation photos to share? Use gallery.
Status — A status is usually a short, twitter-like update or facebook post.
Audio — Usually, audio contains an audio file which will work much like the video format above.
Chat — Displays a chat transcript.
Categories
Categories are a great tool both for you and for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). They’ll help you both organize posts and search engines will understand better what it is your site is about. You’ll have to designate your own categories before being able to pick them but once you do you should always remember to mark which categories new posts fit under.
Tags
Tags are similar to categories but more fluid. You write them (separated by commas) and they help search engines and users to identify what blogs are about better. Always use keywords when possible. For instance, if I were to tag this post it’d likely be tagged “WordPress, tutorial, help, website” etc.
Featured Image
Last, but certainly not least, we come to the featured image section. By setting a featured image, it’ll be right up there at the top of the post and normally it’ll be shown on the front page wherever you can find your posts, too. Your featured image should be directly related to your blog post and always sized right.