If you enter the WordPress post editor and look to the right just above the one or two rows of buttons you can see two tabs labelled Visual and Text.
For most purposes you will work in the Visual area. This offers an approximate version of the post or page you are working on. If you want to see it exactly as it will appear once published, press the Preview button towards the top right. The Visual area has improved in recent upgrades and now it offers a fairly good approximation to what you will see once published. This means writing your post is a little simpler than it used to be.
What is the Text View?
The text area is where you can see the underlying html of the post or page. Some people work solely in this area but I don’t recommend this unless you are familiar with html.
The text area offers a very basic facility to control the detail of what you see on the page; your theme and plug-ins control a lot of it. the Text area enables you to control your posts’ and pages’ appearance using CSS.
There are a few buttons that allow you to add html tags and some are similar to buttons in the visual view. You can add any html into the text area even if it is not available on the buttons.
I’m not going to go into detail. If you know html you can work out what the buttons do and if not you’ll not follow it anyway.
Here are two things to note:
- Sometimes if your post or page does not publish how you expect it to, the reason is visible in the text view. If you know html, it’s worth taking a look.
- You can do a lot by using div with a class attribute supported by css. I use this method to add my cross, tick and arrow bullets. Anything that requires css will need a div tag and class attribute.