First and foremost, a web site is powered mainly by great content. A web site exists to inform the user about something, whether it be the different products or services a business offers or expert advice. So the most important thing about running a WordPress-powered site is knowing how to add content in a way that makes sense and is an efficient use of a site owner’s time.

Step 1: Page or Post – What kind of content is it?

In the beginning, WordPress was developed as a blogging platform. People logged into a “dashboard” and created “posts” which were then displayed on the site in the order that they were created. There was an archiving system that grouped posts by 1) Publish date and 2) Category they were assigned. Then, a separate system was developed as part of WordPress that enabled people to create “pages”. Pages are a way for a site to have content that is always in the same location in the site’s navigation. That way, people who were looking for information about your site quickly, could always find it in the same place instead of having to hunt through the archives.

So how do you know which content should be a “post” and which should be a “page”? There is no definite rule, but the advice I give people is that “posts” should be considered like a press release that you would send out about an event, or a sale, or some item of news about your business or subject, and “pages” are like a brochure that gives a reader more “static” information such as hours of operation, mission statement, location etc.

Step 2: Getting the writing done.

Everyone has a writing process; a way of creating that they are comfortable with and helps them think things through. Lucky for me, I just open my site’s dashboard, select either Post > Add New or Page > Add New and start typing away. Other folks need to write it out long-hand and then edit from there. A lot of clients I’ve worked with are so used to creating content in Microsoft Word that they find their words flow better by opening a new document and going from there. All very valid approaches, but trying to “pour” the content into the dashboard editing window and end up with the correct result is reliant on a few simple practices.

Write Early, Write Often.

Put up a post about your business’s upcoming event, new client or special sale as soon as possible.  And keep your audience informed about things as much as possible.  You don’t need to post new content every five minutes, but you will find that if you keep up a pace that works for your audience, they will remain loyal and even bring in more readers.  Pages don’t require as much upkeep, but it’s always a good idea to give your site’s pages a quick read-through every few months.  That way, you can see it with a fairly fresh eye and decide what needs tweaking.

You’ve Got Competition, Make It Interesting.

Since a picture can say a thousand words, let that work for you.  There are quite a few decent online stock image resources that can really keep a reader glued to your content.

Step 3: How To Create A Post

Think of the 6 tenets of journalism; Who, What, Where, When, Why and How.  Write the specifics down on paper if it helps.  Then, go to your site’s sign-in page (http://yoursitesname.com/wp-login.php) and go to Posts> Add New. You will see a page that looks like the picture below:
The first step is to create a title.  Keep if brief, and try to use words that people are likely to use in a search for similar content.  For instance, if your post is going to be about an upcoming sale your business is having on lawn furniture, you could title it: Lawn Furniture on Sale During September!

Now it’s time to start creating the body of your content.  Take a look at the top of the editing panel:

The 3 areas circled above are key to creating a post or page.  From the left, there is the Upload/Insert media panel, the “Kitchen Sink” toggle button and the “Visual” or “HTML” selection.  It’s a good idea to view a post or page you want to edit in HTML mode before you start to work.  Sometimes there may be code that you don’t want to type over by accident that’s only visible when you look at the HTML of your content.  If you click on the button in the far right of the toolbar, you will see the extra editing choices available in “Visual” mode.

To read a more detailed account of what the various buttons at the top of the editing window can do, check out: How To Use WordPress Part 1.

Tip: If you want to see what your content will look like “live” on the web, you can click “Preview” either in the top right corner of the edit window in the “Publish” panel, or next to the update notice that will appear above your title after you have saved your draft.

Step 4: Making Your Post Easy To Find

Posts are different from Pages not only in what they contain, but how they are organized on your site.  They are automatically displayed in chronological order on the page designated as your Posts page (Settings > Reading).  However, you don’t want your readers to have to hunt through your posts month by month to find something.  This is where Categories and Post Tags come into play.

Categories are what I like to think of as the Big Topic labels for your Posts.  Think of going into a library and having to look for a book about the Civil War.  You know that you need to look in the History Section (Category) under American History (an example of a sub-category).  If the library is well-organized into categories and sub-categories, you probably don’t even need to go through a card catalog right?

Try to come up with a system for creating categories before you put up too much content.  If people find your posts easy to find, they’ll keep coming back for more!

Whenever you write a post,  one of the last steps before hitting “Publish” is to either select a relevant category(s) from a list of the ones you have already created, or, to create a new one by clicking “+ Add New Category” and saving it.   Once you have added a Category, your new post is automatically assigned to it.  Categories can also have a hierarchy so you could have a Post entitled “Musings on the Battle of Bull Run” under both History, American History and Civil War history.  Then, if a reader wants to find Posts specifically about the Civil War, they can select from the Civil War category or if they want to find all the Posts about history, they can select History.

Tags are an even more detailed way to organize your Posts by “tagging” them with keywords.  To continue the analogy of a library, you can have very specific topics within the category of the Civil War such as “Bull Run”, “Manassas” and “Shiloh”.  In order for readers to find posts that are about specific things, it’s always good to create a tagging system based on keywords that you think readers are likely to use to search for your content.  I am always a big fan of the Tag Cloud, a widget (sidebar feature) that displays your Tags in a cluster of words sized according to how often a Tag is used.  For example, I do a lot of writing about WordPress for this site, so the tag “WordPress” is featured in big letters in the tag cloud you see to the right of this post.  If you can’t remember if you have used a particular tag before, you  can always click on “Choose from the most used tags” to see.

Step 5: Creating and Editing Pages

Pages differ from Posts in a few basic ways:  1) They stay in the same “location” of your site as components of your site’s navigation bar (such as the one running across the top of this page).  2) They can be organized into Parent Pages (for example: About) and then Child Pages (such as About Jenn).  3) Pages do not have Categories or Tags assigned to them.

To create a new Page, you simply go to the left toolbar of the Dashboard and select Pages > Add New.  The editing window that appears is basically the same as the one for Posts so no need to go into too much detail here.

To edit an existing page, you can access it a couple of ways.  If you are logged into the site, you can see a small link on each Post or Page called “edit” (when you are looking at the site itself).  Click on “edit” and you can go immediately to the edit window for that page.  For my clients’ sites, I usually use a plugin called “Dropdown Page Manager” that installs a list of all a site’s published pages under the Page section of the toolbar.  Then it’s just a matter of clicking on the title of the page you would like to edit.

However, if you don’t have that plugin installed or, you want to work on the draft of a page you began in an earlier session, click on “Pages” at the top and you will see a list of all your site’s pages, including drafts.  You can either click on the title of the page to open it up, or you can click the Edit link that you see when you hover over the title.

Quick-Edit is another feature that pops up when you hover over the Page title (or Post for that matter) and it can be useful when you want to change certain things about the content.  Clicking the words Quick Edit will open a small window directly on the same page where you can change the title of the Page, its place in the Page hierarchy (for example, selecting a Parent page so the page will now appear in the navigation’s dropdown selections) and other features as well.

You could change the template a page has assigned, if you have other ones available, whether to allow readers to comment on what you have written, the status to Draft, Pending Review or Published and even the date something was published (handy for when you don’t one one post appearing before another chronologically).  Password or Private is used for content that you may only want to be accessible for people with the right credentials.

Coming soon: Part 2: Images.

1: Logging into your WP site
All WP sites have the same login procedure. Go to your browser and in the address bar type in a URL in the following format:

(of course, you’d want to substitute your own site’s name for “jennmearswebdesign.com”)

After that, you will see a screen that looks like this:

You’ll need to enter your User Name and Password here. Tip: Click the box that says “Remember Me” so that your browser can automatically re-insert your password when you visit again. If it doesn’t seem to remember the password and your user name is automatically entered next time you visit, try deleting the last few characters of the user name and re-typing them. That usually triggers the automatic entry of the password.

2: Welcome to the Dashboard

After you have successfully logged in, you should be looking at the WP dashboard. This is your starting point to any task you need to get accomplished for updating your site. Here’s a quick tour:

From the top:
You’ll see your site’s name at the top left corner with a little link that says “Visit Site”. This is handy when you are making changes to the layout and want to see how those changes look. This link will always take you to your site’s home page.
In the top right corner, you will see a “New Post” and a dropdown menu. This is great when you are in a hurry and WP has inserted quick links to the most common tasks for WP users. Next to that you will see “Howdy! and your user name, then a link to “Turbo” which can be installed for faster blogging. Next to Turbo is the Log Out button for when you are done with your session.

Left Dashboard:

The top link, labeled “Dashboard” will return you to the Dashboard home from wherever you are in the admin section. Next down is the area where you can control the basic components of a WP site: Posts, Media, Links, Pages and Comments:

From there, you have your toolbar for editing your site’s look and layout (note, this is only accessible to users with Administrator access):

Themes are the basic templates that your WP site has stored online. This is where you would go if you wanted to choose a new theme for your site.

Widgets are the components that make up the features of your sidebar. When a theme says “Widget-enabled” it means that the theme’s author has coded the ability for the theme to display widgets properly. Widgets are a great way to handle a lot of your site’s functionality.
Tip: If you choose a widget for your sidebar(s), just be aware that it will create a sidebar that only displays widgets. If you have sidebar elements that have been handcoded in the file “sidebar.php”, then you will need to make sure that those can be installed as a widget as well.

Editor is where you can work with the files that make up your site’s theme. For example, if I wanted to change the font on my site’s Posts to a different one than the font on the Pages, I would go to Editor>Style.css and then change the style declaration for posts to display a different font.

The next panel is for Plugin administration. Plugins are applications created to meet various needs site owners may have. Much of the time, a developer realizes that there is a demand for a particular tool, such as a dynamic calendar, or a way to insert custom meta-tags in a site’s headers so they create a package of code to accomplish this and make it available for download often for free or minimal cost. You can explore more about Plugins here.

Users is where you can control who has access to your Dashboard and how much access they can have. If you have a site with a lot of contributors, this is where you will go to control who can go where.

Under Tools, you have 4 selections: Tools, where you can enable Turbo and Press This (also found in the Turbo link in the top right), Import, where you can import content from other blogs, Export, where you can bundle your current blog’s contents, and Upgrade where you can install the latest version of WordPress. (You’ll need to back everything up before doing so).

Settings is a pretty big topic but suffice to say it’s where you can work with features such as your site’s url structure, blog title and description, which Page on your site is the “Home” page and so on. It’s very useful to explore the Settings panel and get used to the wide variety of options available. And, speaking of Options, some versions of WP use the term “options” instead of “settings” which is good to know when you are searching for help online for a WP issue.

So that’s the basic left side toolbar of the dashboard. Underneath Settings is usually where any Plugins that you’ve enabled outside of the standard ones included in WP will show up and you can utilize them from there.

3. Create Some Content

Now that you’re familiar with the dashboard, you can begin creating content for your new site. Since the method for creating Posts and Pages is roughly similar, I’m going to discuss creating a Post and it should help with creating Pages too. What’s the difference you ask? There are a few analogies I like to use but here I’ll just say that Posts are like press releases or newsletters about your company and Pages are like brochures. So, here’s how to create a Post:

Step 1: Log In to the Dashboard
Once you’ve signed in, you’ll notice a window in the top right of the dashboard called “QuickPress”. This is very handy when you want to simply write a post and get it up on the site without a lot of formatting.

Step 2: Creating the Content
If you need more control over the layout and look of the Post, then simply go to the Posts section in the left toolbar and click “Add New”. (You may need to click the arrow to the right of Posts to open the menu.)

Now the full size edit window will open up and you can add the Post’s title and begin creating the content.

Oftentimes people find that they can simply copy and paste text from another format into WP and it works just fine. However you get it in there, once it’s there, you probably want to play with the formatting a little and WP makes this fairly easy in several ways.

Step 3: Formatting the Content
There are two different modes of editing, Visual and HTML. Visual is good when you are working with text and images. HTML mode is handy when you want to paste in things such as an embedded map or video. It’s also possible to create divs and markup for precision styling via your style.css file. Let’s start with a tour of the Visual mode:

These are the buttons for formatting your content. To use them, simply highlight the text you want to change and click one of the buttons. From left to right they are:
Bold
Italics
Strike-Through (when you want to show that some text has been changed)
Unordered List (will format a list with bullet points according to whichever style your theme’s author has designated)
Ordered List (a numbered list)
Block Quote
Align Left
Align Center
Align Right
Insert/Edit a Link
Unlink the text
More (for when you only want to display the beginning of a post on the blog’s home page)
Spellcheck (with various European languages included)
Toggle for Full Screen Mode
Show/Hide “Kitchen Sink” mode (see below)
+ any plugins you have enabled such as CFormsII or NextGen Gallery

Kitchen Sink Mode Buttons:
Paragraph Styles
Underline
Align Full
Text Color
Paste as Plain Text
Paste from Word
Remove Formatting
Insert/Edit Embedded Media
Insert Custom Character
Outdent
Indent
Un-Do
Re-Do
Help (opens a pop-up window)

Editing in HTML Mode

HTML mode is handy when you want to include some markup into your content, but don’t want to deal with hand-coding. You can highlight your text and then apply the various tags like so:
(from left to right)
b=Bold text
i=Italicized
link=A hypertext link
b-quote=block quotet
del=delete
ins=labels text considered inserted into a post. Most browsers display as underlined text. (Assigns datetime attribute with offset from GMT (UTC))
img=this creates a tag for inserting an image into your post. If you have an image stored in your uploads folder, or, on an online album such as Photobucket, you can paste a link into the dropdown window and the image will be displayed on your site.
ul=un-ordered list
ol=ordered list
li=list item on a list
code=Creates preformatted styling of text. Generally sets text in a monospaced font, such as Courier
more=a way for you to contain the beginning of a post on a page and then include a “read the rest of this article” teaser linking to the full post.
lookup=Opens a JavaScript dialogue box that prompts for a word to search for through the online dictionary at answers.com. You can use this to check spelling on individual words.
close tags=closes any open HTML tags in your post.

Step 4: Inserting Media

Once you are satisfied with the text, you can add some media to your post. Click on where you would like an image to appear and then select one of the choices in the Add Media: menu in the top right corner of the edit window. The choices from left to right are: image, video, audio and add media.

Depending on the version of WordPress you are using, the upload window may behave in various ways. Sometimes you can upload images or media just fine, but WP doesn’t want to actually insert them into the post. A little frustrating, but luckily there’s a way around this. In HTML mode, click on the “ins” button and in the dropdown window that appears, enter the image’s url like so:

http://www.yoursitesname.com/wp-content/uploads/year/mo/day/nameofimage.jpg

Tip: if you want an easy way to copy and paste your image’s url, click on add media, then select either “Gallery” for images you’ve just uploaded, or “Media” for everything in your uploads folder. Click on the media you wish to add, and then look for the Link URL listed in the window. Then you can copy and paste that if needed.

Also, I’ve noticed that adding Flash movies is a little tricky. You can circumvent this by installing the Kimili Flash embed plugin. (you’ll need a way to FTP files for installing plugins)

Step 5. Tags, Categories, Author and Advanced Options

Now that the content of the Post (or Page) is all set. You can either save it as a draft, or Publish it. It’s a good idea at this point to assign the Post to a Category and add Tags. These are how your posts are cataloged in your WordPress database so that your readers can find them. I like to think of this as like a library’s way of organizing non-fiction. Categories are like broad topics such as Music, Art and Science, and then Tags are helpful for breaking down categories further such as Rock and Roll, Opera, Painting, Renaissance, Zoology and Particle Physics.

If your blog has multiple authors, always scroll down to check the Authors selection to make sure the right Author is chosen for the post.

WordPress sites can be modified to show only an excerpt of the content to draw readers in for more. If you have this feature, then you can place an excerpt into the Excerpt window.

Trackbacks are for when you have linked to another blog in your post. If they have enabled Pingbacks, they will be notified that you have done this.

Custom Fields, according to WP’s Codex;

offer a way to add information to your site. In conjunction with extra code in your template files or plugins, Custom Fields can modify the way a post is displayed. These are primarily used by plugins, but you can manually edit that information in this section.

You can read more about custom fields here.

Comments and Pings are enabled by default and I’ve never seen a reason to dis-able them. If you didn’t want people to comment on your Post or be notified if someone links back to it, then you could do that here.

Password Protect is used when you want only certain people to see the Posts content. You can set a password here for people to use when they are allowed to read this Post.

Step 6. Publish!
Once you are satisfied with your Post’s content and settings, it’s time to publish. This will place your post at the top of your archives and allow others to read it. Tip: If you want to change the order in which a Post will show up in the Archives(arranged chronologically), click Edit next to Publis and choose a date that will place it where you want in your Archives.

What about Pages???

Pages, (brochure-like info remember?) use the same editing tools as Posts. Pages, however, don’t have Categories or Tags, but they do have hierarchy and templates. If you would like for one page to be a sub-page, or “child” of another, you can choose that from the Parent Page dropdown menu on the right. Page Template is where you can choose a Template that may have been created to give certain Pages on your site a particular layout or “look” via CSS styling. Pages are otherwise set to display the “Default” template.

And that is pretty much it as far as getting your content into your WordPress site. If you have further questions, feel free to send ‘em my way!