There are a lot of things you can do on your WordPress Dashboard once you have created your site, and they take getting used to. Today you will be learning how to make a post to add to your WordPress site. Blogs are a great way to share your knowledge of content to your audience!

Getting to the ‘Add New’ posts

On the dashboard, there is a black panel to the left listing all of the services offered for your WordPress site. Then, hover over the posts tab and click on add new.

Found right under the dashboard tab

You can also click on the posts tab and make a new post by clicking on add a new post on the top of the page

Will show up on the top of the Posts page

Understanding the posting template

This page appears when adding a new post is clicked. The title is in the first block, and the second block is where your article will go.

Overview of the New Post Template

1. Self-explanatory, this is where you add the title for your blog article
2. Add Media opens up your media library and is where you insert your images into the blog. The four blocks decide where you want to place the image. Justify left, center, right – or no justification at all.
   

   Clicking on the image will bring up this option

    

   Next, the pencil icon brings up the image details, which shows you the size of your image and giving options to write captions or an alt-text. It also lets you align your image here and select its size to be displayed. Alt-text is not only good to boost SEO rankings but helps make your blog post more accessible to your audience. 

    

   

   Image Details overview

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

3. Extra options to mark up your blog. You can italicize or make words and sentences bold, add quotations, etc. You also can choose headings here to help you organize your blog post and make it more readable.
   

   Make sure to describe your subheadings in order

4.  The visual and text options indicate whether or not you want to use the WordPress graphical editor or just write up all the markup for yourself. This would be the visual editor. WordPress makes it easy to see what your blog will look like through their visual editor. 

This is the text editor. HTML tags are used to describe the text. In the WordPress visual editor, the results will show up live in front of you.

Text editor

Your subheadings should be done in order from largest to smallest starting with Heading 1

Organizing the blogs headers should be somewhat similar to this. Use subheaders to flesh out different main points. In our previous article, we talk about how your blog organization is important for SEO. Use a larger subheader for more detailed points in each main point. Subheaders are good for SEO as search engines will read subheadings to use as search result answers.

Example of what heading organization looks like

Publishing your blog

Once you finish putting all the information you need inside of your blog and organized it for SEO, its time to publish the blog!

Or maybe you want to schedule your blog for a certain time. Or finish it another time?

Publish Block

You can choose to save your draft, or even see a preview of how your blog looks on the Publish block. It is located on the top right side of the page.

If you have a published piece you wish you take down, you can put the published status back to draft status here.

You can also change the visibility of the post from public, private, to password protected.

It will show you all revisions of your post – so if you mess up, you can click on the Revisions ‘Browse‘ to pull back a copy of your previous work!

Scheduling time for your blog

In the Published section, you can choose a date and time you’d like WordPress to schedule your blog. This lets you post your work for your intended audience without you having to do it yourself if you made your blog at 2 am in the morning!

Blog organization

Select categories your blog belongs to

The categories area allows you to organize where your blog posts belong if you like to blog about multiple topics. Organizing your blogs helps your readers find topics they want to read about more easily and it also boosts your SEO because search engines can search through your site easier.

You can create new categories for your posts as you go.

Include a featured image at the end

Finally, the Featured Image block is where you can insert a picture from your media library to display on the top of your blog. This image is the preview image for social media.

Happy Posting!

Featured Image by Kevin King(Chandana Perera) from Pixabay