WordPress Tutorial #8
Content is what visitors to your site are looking for.
Just as visitors to your home don’t check out how the foundation was poured or the framing, visitors to your website don’t generally care about those elements either.
As long as your navigation works and the site is visually pleasing, they’ll focus on the content.
That’s as it should be.
Fortunately the steps to add content to your WordPress site are similar, whether your content is words, images, video or audio — or any combination.
In this article we’ll walk through the basics of how to add a post to WordPress if you’re using the Classic Editor. Later on we’ll get into some of the finer details.
As always, you start at the WordPress Dashboard.
#1. Select Posts/Add New
Notice the Posts item on the left-hand side of the dashboard. Underneath you’ll see All Posts, Add New, Categories and Tags.
If you click on All Posts, you’ll see an index. To help your visitors search for information on your site, you’ll use Categories and Tags. But for now, let’s just focus on the Add New link.
#2. Select the Visual Editor
Once you’ve clicked “Add Post,” you see a page that looks like this:
Unless you’re comfortable with HTML, make sure the first option, the Visual editor is selected.
Unless you’re comfortable with HTML, make sure the first option, the Visual editor is selected.
The Visual Editor is WYSIWYG — “what you see is what you get.” When you add bold or italic, or when you drop in an image, it shows you what your site visitors will see.
#3. Type the Title
Type the title of your post into the top section where it says “Enter Title Here.” You can change it later, so it’s okay to put in something general for right now.
Notice that after you move your cursor out of the Title area, a web address called a Permalink pops up. It’ll come up later.
#4. Add your article into the Editor
There are two ways to do this.
- Type it in directly, of course. If you do, remember to save early and often!
- Copy and paste from a Word document or other word processing or text editing program program
If you are pasting from a Word or similar document it’s a good idea to select the Paste as Text icon. That’s because Word and other word processing programs add lots of code that can cause problems.
When you paste as text, all those pieces of code are automatically stripped out.
When you’re done pasting content, toggle the paste as text icon back to its unselected position.
[Note: if you don’t see the lower row of icons, click the Toolbar Toggle button that the arrow is pointing to.]
Once you’ve created or added the content for the post, style it using the available commands.
#5. Save Your Work
To the right of the editor you’ll see several menus. Different themes sometimes put them in different order, but generally they’ll look like this:
To expand each one, click in the upper right corner. Here’s where you save your work in progress.
#6. Add Styles, Links, Etc.
Once your article or post is in the editor, you can add bold or italics, create numbered or bulleted lists and add links. You can also insert images, audio or video. We’ll get into all those details in another post.
Updated May 13, 2019.
