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.

This is the previous home page:

And here is the new design, which was based on the Mystique theme by Digital Nature. I went with their theme because it offered a good choice of options, while giving a more code-minded designer like myself “under the hood” access to the template files.

I really liked their design framework for the dropdown menu at the top. I felt that the original site’s navigation didn’t include the right architecture and the user kept having to go back to the home page for links to Financial Advice and a few other items.

The original image theme of the site was lighthouses, which tied nicely into the logo and the concept of the company being a guide to financial safety. However, the photos I had originally taken now struck me as a little cold and distant; probably because I had first created the site during the winter of ’07 and I would have needed a boat to get close enough to get bigger images. So I decided to find images that seemed warmer and more engaging. I found this picture for the Long Term Care Insurance page on iStock.

The sidebar was another area that was ripe for improvement. While the old site had pages where potential clients could request a quote for whatever insurance type the page was about, Beacon decided that it would be easier all-around if they had one standard “Request a Quote” form in the sidebar where it was easy to find no matter where you are on the site. I used the CForms II plugin by Delicious Days here.

The other feature I wanted to upgrade was the location map. It’s become one of my pet peeves when a website has a static image of a map on a page when embedding a Google map of a business’s location is so damn easy. The list under “Insurance News” is a simple list of the site’s blog categories.

By converting the old site’s newsletter-style Insurance Updates pages into blog posts it killed two birds with one stone. The new site could be launched with a full blog already built in and, any new updates that a Beacon agent wanted to write would be easy to fit into the existing set of categories.

Last but not least was one feature that I really love to use on sites: the Subscribe via Email form provided by Feedburner.

A lot of clients want to have some way to contact their client base/readers without a lot of fuss. Unless they really have the resources to manage a full html newsletter service such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact, this is really an elegant solution. While some readers might understand what the orange rss icon means, there are so many still unconverted to the wonders of feed subscription that offering them a way to sign up to receive an email whenever a blog is updated with new content can be very handy.

It’s nice to come full circle with a client and re-visit an earlier job. I needed to come up with a fresh approach and I hope the new site will work well both for Beacon and their customers!

One of the design requirements, is that there had to be an image that would change every time one went to the home page. Not a bad idea, but one of those concepts so deceptively simple that it was lost in a sea of over-elaborate plugins promising to do everything short of picking up your drycleaning.

Finally, I located the Random Image plugin, but was a little skittish about the “freshness date” on the plugin’s WordPress page. It did work with 3.0.2 though except for one small issue: the code that generated the random image only worked on the template side of things, meaning, I could insert the php into the template file that the page was set to , but not on the actual page’s editing window.

I tried putting it into the no-sidebars.php file that I was using and saving it as a different template, and the random image would display, but the sidebars would show up! What’s a girl to do?

Short Code Exec PHP to the rescue! Once installed, you can input php code into the editing window (located in Settings>Short Code Exec PHP). Just be sure to leave the initial and ending php tags out. See below:

Then, I went to the page I wanted a random image to appear on and put the short code by using the random-img short code tag I had defined in the Short Exec settings.
And, just like that, I have a random image generated every time I load the page. This is great for when a plugin creator doesn’t have short code instructions available!

At least something is going right today…

jennsweb.blogspot.com

Recently I looked at my client list and realized that I now have quite a few whose sites include a blog.  Some of them update the blog on a regular basis and send out an email to all their subscribers to let them know there’s something new to read.  Others put a new post up once in a while and then there’s the ones who wrote 2 or 3 posts in a rush when their site was first launched and haven’t updated since then.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being taciturn.  Hey, in New England it’s practically a virtue, but with so much online customer/company interaction these days, having a blog and never doing anything with it is like hiding in the stockroom when a customer walks in the door.

I think a lot of it has to do with the sheer vastness of the blog-0-sphere.  There’s a dizzying array of blogging platforms, services, widgets, feeds and gadgets out there that can make any busy business owner throw up their hands and retreat back into their snail-mail newsletter shell.  So, hopefully, I can help by breaking this complex idea down into its basic components.

Why would I want to have a blog in the first place?

Because it’s fun!  It really is.  Whether it’s finding a great site that would help your customers find useful information, great photos from your company cook-out, or even the news that someone at your firm had a baby, it’s a good feeling to put it out there for everyone to see.  It’s also a way to turn a problem into a positive thing.  When I’ve had to spend an entire afternoon searching for a solution to an issue on a client’s site, putting a post up that shows how I solved the problem not only helps me to have it “on-file” for the next time the issue comes up, it’s good karma to provide an answer where none existed before!

Some other great reasons to have a blog for your business are:

1: It’s good for the environment.  Remember the mailed-out newsletter?  I still get one from AAA every quarter and I’m usually so busy, it goes right into the recycling bin.  Instead of all that formatting and list merging, envelope-licking and stamp buying, a blog post, set to be emailed via RSS to a client who has opted for email updates, has a much better chance of actually being read and doesn’t use any paper!

2. It’s free advertising.  Sure, you could spend hundreds of dollars on print ads, even more on an Adwords campaign, but perhaps the most effective way to gain new business is to provide an online resource for customers to find out more about your business.  People are always happy (and grateful!) to receive free information.  Informed and happy is how you want people to feel when they come to you for business.

How do I get a blog?

There are many blogging “platforms” out there, but the 2 I am most familiar with are WordPress (which runs this site) and Blogger.  WordPress offers 2 options.  If you don’t want to deal with signing up for your own self-hosted (published under your own site name on a hosting company’s server) blog, then you can go to WordPress.com and get a blog going there.

Your WordPress Blog "dashboard"

If you have your own site already and you just want to add the blog to it, you can either install WordPress in a subfolder of your site (and call the folder “blog”) and then just add a link to it in your navigation (example: jennmearswebdesign.com/blog), or you can set up your entire site in WordPress and assign a page to contain the blog portion of the site.

(Editor’s note: Blogger now has a Pages gadget to add static pages to your blog.)

Blogger is now a service offered by Google.  A blogger.com blog’s URL looks like this:

http://salemliving.blogspot.com

If you have a Google account, just sign in and go to Settings, then Google Account Settings.  Blogger is listed there along with other great (free!) tools to enhance your blog.

Your Blogger Dashboard

By the way, getting a Google account is a very useful overall step to take a business owner.  It allows you to create a Google Maps listing for your business and get easy-to-access online email as well as being a foundation for many cool blogging tools such as Feedburner.

Feedburner lets you provide a way for readers to follow your blog.

What do I write about and how often?

For a straight-up business blog, it’s best to focus your writing on information related to your business.  For example, I have a client that’s a lawyer and their blog consists of posts about various court case rulings that affect their area of practice.  If you are in the medical field, it may be a good idea to write about medical studies and other news related to your particular area of medicine.  A blog is your opportunity to give your clients useful information that is tailored just to them.  You know your clients and you know when things need to be put into layman’s terms and phrased in ways that they will understand.

Of course not every entry needs to be cut and dry information about your field.  Posts can be about things that are happening in your life like how much fun you are having coaching your daughter’s softball team, or a great new restaurant you ate at the other night.  Having a month-long special in your store?  Put up a post on your blog and then publish updates throughout the month about how sales are going.  I publish a new post when I launch a new website and it lets people know what kinds of clients I have and how I approach different web design situations.

How often should you write on your blog?  This is a pretty open-ended question.  The best answer is to sit down, think about your schedule throughout the week, and try to find 15-30 minutes somewhere that you can use for updating your blog.  Blogs that are updated on a steady basis are the ones that quickly develop loyal followers.  It’s not quantity, it’s quality.  A single well-written post with cool pictures and links once a week is 10 times better than a gaggle of half-baked, info-light random blurbs.

Good tip: If you are worried that you will end up staring at a blank editing window, come “blog-time”, take some time to write down at 10 different ideas for posts and save them for a rainy day.  I keep a notebook throughout the day when I’m working and it really helps when I have writer’s block to flip through and find the different ideas scattered throughout the pages.

How can I get people to read my blog?

Tell people that it’s there! If you already have a client email list, then send out an email with the link to the blog in it. Just be sure you are comfortable with how your blog looks first and you’ve got at least 2 or 3 (proofread!) posts on the home page already.

Be sure to include a way for people to subscribe to your blog via email. (By default, all blogs offer a way to “check in” for updates via an RSS feed but unless your audience is particularly tech-savvy, they won’t likely choose to do so. Also, most people check their email at least once a day. Your blog’s feed service will check your blog periodically and send out an email to a subscriber if you have posted new stuff.

Also, if you are on any social network that lets you post a profile, add your blog’s URL to your profile. Provide a “feed” of your blog on your Facebook profile or page and people can visit your profile and get updated on your blog in one visit.

Basically, the easier you make it for people to read and follow your blog, the more your blog will be read.

Best Blogging Practices

Be succinct

Title your posts wisely.  Web crawlers look for keywords primarily in page titles which, for a blog post is the title of the post.

Pictures keep people reading.  Just make sure you are using them legally.

Keep your content organized and easy to search through.  Using tags and categories (basically assigning relevant keywords to a post) will make it easier for readers to browse your blog (and keep browsing!)

Open a dialogue with your readers.  Was this post helpful for you?  Not anything you didn’t know already?  Do you have more questions?  Send me some feedback below!

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”!

When Katharine Navins, Tallow Studio’s owner needed a WordPress developer to bring her site design for Lovejoy Designs to fruition, she came to Jenn Mears Web Design with the page concepts and site architecture wonderfully laid out with a great eye towards color and balance. Utilizing a theme called Silver Dreams, I was able to re-create Tallow’s design and developed some page templates to match the various looks through-out the site. The biggest challenge came with the desire to present the Portfolio and Featured Products sections with an interactive gallery that allowed the user to click on thumbnails to view a full-size image on the same page. I decided to use Alex Rabe’s NextGen Gallery plugin with some extensive modifications developed by Arafatbd.net and several other members of the WordPress community. After a few late nights and some wp forum stalking, the site finally came together. Love Joy Designs is a Boston-based interior design firm owned by Phoebe Lovejoy Russell, a designer with a great flair for color, form and function. Her throw pillow designs were especially fun ( a great bonus when you are tweaking a gallery of them at 1am!) and her blog, Design Lab, is sure to inspire readers everywhere.

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!

I really want to get out of this gloomy dark green theme get some uniformity across the various sites and networks that I manage. The past year has been so crazy, what with running after a toddler, getting new projects out the door and keeping up with what’s happening on the web, that when I look at this site now, I see the haphazardness of it all. As each new tool or feature came onboard, they were sort of randomly thrown into the left or right sidebar, and now I’m ready to make cohesive design sense of it all.