The Geeky Guide to WordPress – Adding Content

As I’ve been doing this blogging thing a little while now and it seemed a good idea to pass on a few of the things that I’ve learned over the five years that I’ve been doing this. In easy and often geeky steps you’ll be taken through the steps and point out the pitfalls of taking your blog seed and growing it into something really amazing.

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 The First Blog Post

Your first blog post is a milestone for you and your blogging adventure and if you do it right needs a little thought.

WordPress gives you a first post, I guess to show you what it is you can do. There are a few pictures in your media library so you have what you need to create your first post.

Here are some ideas for your first post:

Hello World : Based in every programmers first program say hello from your blogging world, let people know who you are, what you’re about.

“Your Story” Part One : Some people use blogs to write their story, start at the beginning.

Just Dive In : It might be that your blog is a planned out ‘go to’ site for information or you might just start as you mean to go on. This is diving straight in.

 

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Writing and Setting up your post

On the top right of WordPress there is the ‘Write’ button, clicking on this brings up a blank canvas, the start of an exciting new post!

At the top there is a panel of tool options, much of it my be recognisable from MS Word and other word processors. But there are a few extras that will be covered later.

 

 

There will also be the post settings panel on the right. This can be toggled on and off with the black setting cog button.

For now let’s keep this simple: Categories and tags were covered in the first Geeky Guide to WordPress post. As it stated more Categories and Tags can be added here.

The Featured Image option allows an image to be featured at the top of a post. If a post had a book cover this would be it and it can be effective in attracting a reader’s attention.

The featured image can now come from Google and the media library on your WordPress.com site. Adding media to this is easy and will be covered next.

Allowing comments and pingbacks allows other bloggers to talk to you and to link to your post. Generally this is a good thing so keep them ticked.

If there is already a published post that is similar in format to the post being written Copy Post allows this post to be copied and edited to make it a new post.

 

 

 

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Media

With the words sorted now the pictures and media need some attention. Uploading pictures from your phone or camera, or stock pictures from the like of shutterstock or Canva is fairly easy. On the top left of your Screen there’s an Add icon, use this and select media to bring up your site’s media.

On the top left use Add New to navigate to the media to be used and depending on the upload speed the images will be available for use pretty quickly. If using a free wordpress.com site then video’s cannot be uploaded, but it is easy to add them with a link.

A note on pictures that I tried once, copying them and pasting from the internet kind of works, but becasue they don’t get added to your media library they have a habit of randomly vanishing. The best way to add pictures is without doubt from the library.

Adding online Video’s

This is as basic as it gets, copy and paste the link into the post. WordPress sorts it all out so that the video can be played within the blog post.

 

Adding Music

I’ve not tried adding music to the media library, I don’t think it works. What is worth knowing though is that adding a soundtrack or audio file from YouTube or other online sharing site like Soundhound is easy. As with video’s copy the link and paste it into the post.

BUT this isn’t so easy with Spotify, if the person at the other end of the blog post doesn’t have a Spotify account or it’s not installed on their device they cannot listen to it. I didn’t know this and I had been posting music for weeks, it was a bit of an epic fail!

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I hope this post has been useful. Let me know about any experiences you’ve had which I could add to this.

Planet Simon

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