When adding a blog post or news story to your website you’re writing a post. Posts are automatically displayed in date order showing the most recent first. Posts often have a comments area below them and are included in a RSS feed for your website.

With WordPress it’s very easy to add and manage posts, you do so from the WordPress admin area which we looked at in our previous WordPress post.

Adding a new post

Once you’ve logged into the WordPress admin area click the Posts button and then Add New, this will take you to the add new post screen. From here it’s fairly straightforward.

There are two things that all posts need before you can publish them: a title and the content, however it is also good practice to keep your posts organised by assigning categories and tags.

The first thing you should enter is a post title, this goes into the first text area. Secondly you should add your content, when adding the content you can either write it directly into the editor or paste existing copy into the editor.

Note: if you paste content into the editor it is important you remove any formatting, otherwise the pasted content may cause the layout and formatting of the website to change. To avoid this rather than pasting directly into the content area first press the ‘Paste as plain text’ button () and then paste your content, doing this will maintain the style and layout of your website.

After you’ve added content to the editor you can format it using the WordPress formatting bar.

Next you’ll want to assign your post to a category and add relevant tags.

Categories – Each post in WordPress is filed under a category. Thoughtful categorization allows posts to be grouped with others of similar content and aids in the navigation of a site.

Tags – A tag is a keyword which describes all or part of a Post. Think of it like a Category, but smaller in scope. A post may have several tags, many of which relate to it only peripherally. Like Categories, Tags are usually linked to a page which shows all posts having the same tag. Unlike Categories, Tags can be created on-the-fly, by simply typing them into the tag field.

Using the categories block in the right hand column tick the categories you’d like to assign the post to, if you’d like to add a new category simply use the ‘+ Add New Category’ button.

Add tags in the post tags block, you can separate tags by using commas. Don’t forget to press the add button once you’re done!

Now that you’ve added the content and assigned categories and tags you’ll probably want to check out how the post is going to look on the website before you publish it for the world to see. You can see how the post will look on your website by clicking the ‘Preview’ button in the top right hand column.

Finally once you are happy with the post you can publish it to the website by pressing the ‘Publish’ button.

If the post isn’t quite finished you can ‘Save Draft’, this will allow you to return to the post later to continue editing.

You can also schedule a time for the post to be published to the website, if you do this the post will automatically show on the website at the date and time you specify.

Editing or deleting a post

There are times when you will want to make changes to something you’ve already posted, and in some cases you may want to delete a post all together.

To modify an existing post click All Posts under the posts menu in the WordPress admin area, this will take you to a screen that lists all of the posts on your website, if you hover over one of the posts you’ll see a small menu, from this menu select the action you’d like to carry out.

If you choose to trash the post it will remove it from your website and also from the WordPress admin area all together, if you click edit you will return you to the post editor where you can make the necessary changes, when you’ve finished editing your post don’t forget to hit the update button, this will immediately publish the changes you have made to your website.

In our next WordPress post we’ll take a look at adding images, links and videos to posts or pages.

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