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.

Once you have downloaded, installed and activated the NextGen Gallery Plugin, when you go to your WP dashboard, it appears at the bottom left like so:

NextGen's Location in the WP Dashboard

Clicking next to the plugin’s name will open a list of tools and settings for NextGen:

NextGen Gallery Tools and Settings

Here’s a quick guide to the various areas of the NextGen toolbox:
1: Overview
2: Add Gallery/Images
3: Manage Gallery
4: Album
5: Tags
6: Options
7: Style
8: Set Up
9: Roles
10: About

1: Overview

Opens a page that contains general info about Next Gen. You can see a count of your albums, galleries and images, the names of recent donors to the plugin’s author (some nice exposure in exchange for a little support-these things don’t write themselves), updates from Alex Rabe’s blog, related plugins (good to check out for ways to extend Next Gen) and your Graphic Library settings.

Step 1. Click on Upload Images

2: Add Gallery/Images

Fairly self-explanatory, this is where you would go to create a new gallery or add images to an existing gallery. Click on “browse” to select an image from your computer. Then, select the gallery they will be uploaded to.

Step 2. Select your images

3. Manage Gallery

This brings you to a list of all your galleries. Click one of your galleries to edit the following settings:

Title: The title your gallery will have when it’s displayed on a page.

Description: A brief summary of the gallery’s content

Path: The file path for your gallery.

Page Link To: When the gallery is displayed as the content of an Album, choosing a page here will create a linked image and title that can be clicked on to go directly to that gallery’s page.

Preview Image: Lets you choose which image will be displayed when the gallery is shown in an Album.

Author: Lets you show the Gallery’s author.

Create Page: This feature allows you to create a page for the Gallery if you need to.

Below those options is a dropdown menu of Actions. If you need to make changes to several or all the images at once, this will save you time:

No Action: the default

Set Watermark: Allows you to embed text onto the image to mark it as yours.

Create New Thumbnails: This is what you need to use if you have changed your Thumbnails settings under Options (see below).

Re-size Images: You may need to re-size images to fit your site’s style.

Delete Images: Allows you to perform a batch delete on selected images.

Import Metadata: Allows you to import metadata (e.g. EXIF, IPTC, or XMP data) from images and set it in the alternate title text field. (Thanks Dave!)

Rotate Images Clockwise/Counter-Clockwise: Fairly self-explanatory.

Copy To: Lets you copy the selected images to a different gallery.

Move To: Lets you move the images from one gallery to another.

Add/Delete/Overwrite Tags: Allows you to batch-edit tags-keywords associated with the images that can enable the images to be selected by keyword-based searches.

If you have selected one of these actions, just click on Apply to put the changes in effect. You can also choose to Sort the Gallery which takes you to a page where you can re-arrange your images. To return to the Gallery editing window, just click Return to Previous Page on the far right. Also, if you did change anything, make sure you click “Save Changes” to put all your edits into effect.

The bottom of the Manage Gallery page contains a list of all that Gallery’s images. If you just need to edit one image, or, if each image needs individual editing, you can do that here.

4. Album

If you need to sort your Galleries into categories, then you need to create Albums. The analogy at work here is that you can have a family album entitled “Vacations” and perhaps another entitled “Weddings” and into those albums you would put collections of photos (or galleries) called “Disneyworld09″ and “Phyllis & Mike”.

Click and drag an album from the right window to place it in the left window for editing.

Once you have selected which album you want to edit, just drag it over to the far left window to add galleries via the drag and drop method.

Click Update to place the Galleries into the Album selected.

5. Tags

This allows you to edit existing tags, re-name tags, delete tags and also edit the tags’ slug (the way it will be written into the page’s URL). For example: if you had tagged an image as “Family Vacations”, the slug could be specified as family-vacations. Choosing your slugs wisely makes you site more “search friendly”.

This makes the image likely to show up in a search for the terms "home" AND "interior".

6. Options:

This is where you go to control the following settings:
General: set the gallery path, delete image files (check to remove the images from the database when you remove a gallery, activate permalinks, select a graphic library, activate an rss feed for your images and activate some Javascript effects for your galleries to create certain displays of images. Another feature you can edit here is how your images can be attached to posts that shares certain search terms, either by categories or tags.

Thumbnails: Here you can set the dimensions and the quality of your galleries’ thumbnails. Just be sure to go to Manage Galleries > Select a gallery > Actions and select “Create New Thumbnails” after you do this.

Images: Here you can edit your images’ size, quality, enable caching of images when someone browses a gallery and also clear the cache folder in case you change certain image settings.

Gallery: You can set a large array of options for your galleries here. Deactivate a gallery page’s link, set the number of images per page, set the number of image columns, integrate Slideshow settings, choose to show either a slideshow or a list of thumbnails, simply show the imagebrowser, add hidden images, enable Ajax pagination and choose Sort options.

Effects: This is where you can set the way images will be displayed once their thumbnails in a Gallery are clicked. Note: the only two options that will work automatically are Thick Box (which displays the image with a thick white border over a sheer gray background) and Shutter (similar display but with no border). Highslide and Lightbox effects can only be generated when certain javascript is inserted into your content folder. For an example of the Highslide effect, click here and then click one of the images under Galleries.
To see what the Lightbox effect is go here and select one of the images.

Watermark: Here you can edit your settings for displaying watermarks such as whether yo want to use an image or text to protect your images from theft.

Slideshow: Set your slideshows’ appearance. Note: you will need to download an auxiliary plugin named JW Image Rotator to get the slideshows to function.

7. Style:

Style allows you to choose from 7 different stylesheets for your Album and Gallery displays as well as customize the CSS to suit your site’s look and layout. The available readymade styles aren’t radically different from each other, but here is a series of screenshots with the various choices in effect.

Gallery displaying the default style

Black Minimalism Theme

DKret 3 Theme

Hovereffect Styles

K2 Theme

Shadow Effect

Shadow Effect with Description Text

Not stunningly different in appearance I know, but, look at things this way. You can select a style, customize it any way you like via CSS and then, if things get hairy, you can always select another style to revert your design to something similar to its original state.

8. Set Up:

This page gets a little lost in translation for me. One would expect it to contain info about folders and ports and such but this is actually where you go to fully remove any images/galleries/album info from your database. That first line you see:
“You don’t like NextGEN Gallery ?” always reminds me that awkward moment when you have to tell your mother-in-law “No thanks” when offered a helping of her special “Spam ‘n Cheezwiz Surprise”. I wish this section was called “Uninstall” instead.

9. Roles:

This is a nice touch. If you run a site that has several administrators/editors/contributors (the basic WordPress roles), this is where you can assign different levels of access to the NextGen galleries for different people.

10. About:

Here’s where the credits roll. If you are burning with desire to see who contributed to this plugin’s development and/or economic survival, then this is the section for you. And, if you find NextGen so fabulous that you want to throw some cash their way, there’s a “Make a Donation” button right under the heading “How to Support?”.

Related Links:

Hungry for more? Here’s a list of links to other NextGen-related articles that I have gathered in the course of working with the NextGen plugin:

Vuthy.com: Guide to Using NextGen’s Albums and Galleries

Scotproof’s: Inserting a NextGen gallery or slideshow in a custom field

Narasopa Media’s: Adding Title and Description to NextGen Gallery Thumbnails

And stay tuned for the next article in my NextGen series: “Customizing Your Gallery”!

Once you are in your place where you edit, just be sure you are in html mode:

Create your post and highlight the text where you’d like to create a link by clicking the “add link” button.
Then, paste your link in the the popup window. Now here’s where the fun starts. You now have a basic html tag in your post like “a href=”placeyoulinkedto.com”. But since you are in html mode, you can make that link a different color by editing the tag like so:

Here’s a better capture of what your code needs to change to:

Of course, you can change the 6-digit hex code to anything you want. Used sparingly, it’s a good tool for getting your readers to really notice a link you want them to visit.