Writing Your First WordPress Post

In working with clients I’m finding business owners are ready to take their websites to the next level by connecting with their customers via. a blog. The problem? Most of them have never blogged before and feel a bit overwhelmed by the process. To get them started, I’ve created a beginners guide to posting on WordPress.

Signing in:

If your site is set up on your own domain name, and is a self-hosted version of WordPress, your login URL will look something like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-login.php

When you are prompted, enter your username and password and press Log In.

You’ll be presented with your WordPress Dashboard. While the setup of this page may vary, you’ll normally see a few boxes with stats on your latest posts and visitors, latest comments, and an overall At-A-Glance overview of post and comment numbers.

On the left is a series of navigation boxes. To start a new post, select Post to expand this portion of the menu. Then select Add New.

A text editor will open and you’re ready to begin writing and formatting your post.

Composing a Post:

The top field is for your post/article title. You’ll want to make this something informative and catchy. It is the introduction to your post and should grab your reader’s attention.

In the body of the editor, type your content. Use the toolbar to format just as you would in Word, Works, your email dashboard or any other text editor.

Important Note: If you have previously written your content in a text editor such as Word or Works, copying and pasting into the visual editor will appear to bring your formatting, but it will entirely mess up your site. Outside programs like Microsoft bring in a lot of unseen and undesirable code which wreaks havoc on WordPress. To avoid this, you can either write the content in WordPress to begin with, or copy from your document and paste into the HTML editor (see tabs at the top of the WP Editor.) Then, return to the visual editor and proceed with formatting.

When you have finished writing and editing your content, press Save As Draft in the top right of the page.

Read some of the following posts for further instruction!

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