Learn how to:

1. Create a new post
2. Use the editing toolbar
3. Use heading styles
4. Use Paragraph styles
5. Format a Block Quote
6. Save Drafts and Publish
7. Use Post Categories
8. Use Post Tags

Know the basics:  This page relies on understanding the terminology, rhetorical features and structures of blogs and websites. See other pages in WordPress Basics, such as WordPress Rhetoric.

Create a new Post

In various places on the Dashboard you will find a button to add a “New Post.”
Click it, and you will get this editing area:

Use the editing toolbar

Expand the toolbar: To enable the second row of editing tools (shown above and below), click the button on the top right, called “show/hide Kitchen Sink.”

Practice using the editing buttons:

• Try making a bulleted item.  Do NOT insert a “-” character manually to create your own lists.
• Try numbering a list.  Do NOT type in the numbers, let WordPress number the list for you.
• Try selecting text and inserting under it a hyperlink pasted from somewhere.
• Try inserting a symbol using the Omega button. You may need to use this for the long dash, etc.
• Try inserting an image or a file using the media buttons.

Team tip: Use a house style guide

Before you finalize your pages, you will need to create or be given a style guide that you and your whole team can follow to create a uniform style for your content. The style guide will be your “house rules.” It will state how to format headings, images, when to use italics and bold, etc. You will be graded on how well you follow the style guide.

Use heading styles

This is important: DO NOT create headings by making the text bold, larger, or italic, etc. Instead, use the heading level selector shown in the image to the right. This is important to create a uniform appearance across the website.

What’s the difference? Selecting the paragraph or heading style places HTML tags around your headings like <h2>heading</h2>.  WordPress will interpret “h2″ according to the font, size, and weight established in the theme’s stylesheet.

• If you use styles properly, if you ever change the WordPress theme, the site-wide fonts, or the style of “Heading 2,” all your headings coded <h2> will change uniformly.
• If you did NOT use the paragraph style, and you wanted to change your heading styles, you would then have to find every Heading 2 that you created manually, and change them all manually.
• If you create a site collaboratively and even one of your team members does NOT use styles, then different pages may use different sizes, fonts, and weights for headings. It will take a long time to find them all and standardize them.
• Colors can be changed site-wide by editing the StyleSheet. Here is how I changed the colors of all links to green and headings 1 and 2 to burgundy: HeadingAndLinkColors.txt

Practice: Create a heading within your post.Select the text that you want to turn into a heading. Then click the down arrow on the style selector and select heading level 1 or 2, etc.

Use Paragraph styles

Paragraphs also have a normal paragraph style, so make sure your paragraph content is using ”Paragraph” style.  List items have a bullet list style, and block quotes have a style.

It’s a good idea to remove all formatting using the eraser button in the toolbar if you are pasting text from somewhere else. Then select all the text and apply the normal “paragraph” format to it.

If you paste text from Word, please use the “Paste from Word” button to remove the coding that will interfere with your post.

Format Block Quotes

A Block Quote is a paragraph style selected the same way as heading and paragraph styles. It is a way of displaying quoted text as an indented paragraph so that it is very clear that you are quoting someone else.  It should be used for quoted passages that are longer than a line or two.  It can be used for shorter quotations when you want to highlight them.

In one WordPress theme, the block quote style inserted two large quotation marks as shown below:

This is visually helpful for a reader.  It is also an ethical way of handling longer quotations.  When quoting from previously published works, you need an APA citation (not shown in the examples)

STEP ONE:  While editing a Post, select the text you would like featured as a quote and isolate it as a single paragraph within your post.

STEP TWO:  Click on the Quote icon:

Now your sentence should move to the middle of the rest of the text. Save, Publish or Update your post to keep the change.  View the change in Preview or in the site/blog to see how WordPress formats your block quote.

Save Drafts and Publish

This is simplest and safest way to manage your blog:

Save “drafts” as you start composing. Drafts are NOT viewable on your front page.  They are only viewable by you and other authors within your Dashboard.

“Publish”your items as soon as you have a good draft. Content that is not “published” will not be included in your submitted assignments, including drafts submitted for peer review. Publishing content ASAP helps your team and your instructor to see your content in the site or blog itself, not just in the Dashboard.

“Edit” your published items prior to the final deadline. We all notice important flaws a few days later as we see our writing through a viewers’ eyes. From your blog’s public view, if you are logged in, there will often be a small “edit” link in the header of a published post or page you want to edit. Alternatively, go into your Dashboard and view all your posts, and then select the one you want to edit.

• The “publish” button will now say “update”.
• An updated post will retain its original “posted on” date and URL stem. WordPress will not notify viewers or subscribers that you have updated it.

Use Page Categories

• If you choose a sub-category, WordPress will enable people to view it if they click on the main category it falls under.
• If your categories are pre-set by your community partner, instructor, or team Do NOT create NEW categories without their approval.

Use Page Tags

Tags are an additional or alternative way of indexing posts by key words. They are often displayed in a blog via a tag cloud of words with various sizes signifying the greater number of posts with those tags.  You may need or want a widget that generates a tag cloud so that users can click on key words to access those posts.

However, it’s better NOT to use tags in addition to categories unless you have a very good reason and plan ahead.

Any teams using tags will have to minimize and manage the chaos that will result. In a collaborative environment, you can quickly end up with too many tags, poorly chosen tags, synonymous tags, and duplicate tags with different formatting (capitals, hyphens and spacing), and multi-word tags that don’t work well in tag clouds.

If tags are not used wisely, users will then click on a tag and will not find all the posts on that theme. Tag clouds will also be difficult to view and use.

Team tip: Assign roles and navigation

As you construct content, each team member should know who is responsible for pages and posts on particular themes and within certain areas of the website: The team coordinator will do X, Sarah will do Y, etc.

As you finalize your website, you’ll need to have developed categories and a navigation map. Without pre-existing categories and navigation chart, a team can’t apply categories to their content posts.  It is also easier to know when to embed links to pages or posts, and how to explain cross-references to neighboring content, i.e. “Find more stories about X in the Testimonials area”