Congratulations! You’re the owner of a brand new WordPress website and are all set to start managing your site and producing content. Now what?
Getting started can be overwhelming. Don’t worry, we’re here to help get you pointed in the right direction. We’ve assembled some shortcut links below to help you get started managing your site in WordPress.
(If you are our customer and get stuck, don’t hesitate to email – websupport@aetechnology.net)
Pages vs. a Posts
In WordPress, you can write either Posts or Pages. When you’re writing a regular blog entry, you write a post. Posts, in a default setup, appear in reverse chronological order on your blog’s home page. Pages are for content such as “About,” “Contact,” etc.
Pages live outside of the normal blog chronology, and are often used to present timeless information about yourself or your site — information that is always applicable. You can use Pages to organize and manage any contentThe basic difference is that Posts are entries listed in reverse chronological order on the blog and Pages are static and are not listed by date.
Using the Visual Editor
The visual editor provides a semi-WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) content editor that allows you to easily create, edit, and format your blog content in a view similar to that of a word processor. Every Post and Page is edited using the Visual Editor, so you will become very familiar with how to use it.
Read about the basics of using the Visual Editor in WordPress »
Working with Images
The most common way of adding images to your site is adding an image directly to a post or page. This automatically saves the image in the Media Library and displays the image wherever you inserted it.
Adding Links
Paste as Text Button
This is important! Pay special attention to the best practices for copying and pasting from Word or other programs with rich-formatted text (like an email program, Excel, almost everything except the most basic text Editor like NotePad) into WordPress.
It is important that the “paste as text” button is used when pasting into WordPress to avoid pasting in extraneous tags that interfere with the display of the page. These articles explain where to find all the buttons, etc.
- Visual Editor – http://en.support.wordpress.com/visual-editor/
- Working with Microsoft Word – http://en.support.wordpress.com/microsoft-word/
Semantic Content (using the Styles Dropdown)
Use the “Styles” dropdown to apply Heading 1, Heading 2, etc. for headings instead of trying to modify the size/color for each heading in the content.
We will have default styles in place in the CSS for each of the Headings so that they have a consistent appearance across the site. Using the Heading tags (semantic coding) makes your content more appealing to search engines and also more accessible. After you make a heading, if you want to give it a specific color, you can still do that if needed using the text color tool.