This is the first post in a guide to the basics of blogging. I shall refer to WordPress because it is one of the most frequently used blogging platforms. Most editors are similar; functionality is likely to be the same although you may have to hunt around to find the right button to press.
I suggest you open your website’s dashboard and then follow my description below.
When you first log into WP-admin, you will see the dashboard. There is a menu to the left. Click on Posts and you will find a page called All Posts. A secondary menu opens below Posts in the main menu. You will see Add New in this new list and you will also see a button labelled the same at the top of the main page. Click on Add New.
This page is the post editor. What you see depends to some degree on your active plug-ins.
The main menu remains in the left hand column. This enables you to move around your WordPress site. What you see in it depends on your user type.
A Tour of the Post Editor
Post Title
The main central column is where you enter and edit your blog post. The first thing you should see at the top is Enter Title Here. When you have finished typing and moved to another part of the editor, your post’s url will appear under the title. Various aspects of the url can be changed but the only thing you can change from the editor is the part of the url from the title. You will see the url includes your title highlighted, without capitals or punctuation and with hyphen between words. If you want to change your url, eg shorten it, then you can hit edit and do that. There isn’t normally any advantage to doing this. I find it most helpful if I change the title later because the url remains the same. So if you want the new title to be in the url, you need to change it manually.
Media
Next you will see one or more buttons. The one that is always there is Add Media and I shall cover this in a future post. If there are other buttons, eg Add Form, this will depend on your plug-ins.
Text and Visual Editors
Next down and on the right you will see two tabs, Visual and Text. The Text tab shows you your post with the mark-up (html) visible. Some people work in this view but I wouldn’t recommend it for a beginner, even if you know html. Visual shows you the post fairly close how it will appear following publication. However, it is not exactly the same and you can preview your pages.
Editor Buttons
Below the tabs there are the main editor buttons. I’ll look at these in future posts. Next there is the main text area for your post. Simply start typing or if you have copied your post from another document, position the cursor in the text area and press the control key and “V”. This will paste text into the text area. If you right-click you will find there is no paste control in the menu, so you must control-v. (This works for text from Microsoft Word; to paste in text from elsewhere it is best to press the T icon in the menu before control-v.)
If you scroll down, you will most likely find nothing below the text area. However some themes include other controls and I’ll write about them another time.
Publishing
Back to the top and the right hand column. The first box headed Publish includes three buttons, two at the top labelled Save Draft and Preview and a blue one at the bottom labelled Publish. Whilst WordPress autosaves your work, sometimes it’s between saves and so Save Draft will make sure all your work is saved but not published to your website. This means you can break off, exit the programme and then return and continue to work on your post later.
Publish loads your post onto your website so the world can see your post. Preview opens a dummy webpage in your browser and shows you exactly how your post will look. This is particularly helpful when you include media in your post.
Below the first two buttons you will see Status, Visibility, Publish and Publicize. I find the first two have very occasional use. Publish is where you can schedule your post; WordPress waits until your stated date and time to publish it. Publicize shows you which social media receive notice of your posts. This may not be visible until you set something up.
I will cover the next two boxes, Categories and Tags, in future posts. There may be other boxes depending on your theme and active plug-ins.
Next time we’ll hop back and take a look at the All Posts page. I’m happy to cover aspects in more detail on request – just leave a comment.
