Make a Simple Wordpress Blog Post

By Kyle Fox - Last Updated: 2024-07-03

Introduction

It is apparent that WordPress is a great CMS platform to build a low maintenance, low cost, professional website, simply by the sheer number of WordPress websites that exist today. WordPress 6.5 has been downloaded over 136 million times and counting since July 3rd, 2024 (ref.https://wordpress.org/download/counter/). Needless to say, WordPress is killing it.

Many businesses have been set up with a WordPress website by a web design professional. Usually, the business will pay a designer to update the website’s content and create new blog posts for informational or S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimization) purposes. This is a great way to jump start your web presence. However, with designers’ rates ranging from $30 to $80 an hour, it can quickly become a heavy burden to maintain. Since the content itself is typically written by the business owner, it’s not a far stretch for any business to consider maintaining their website themselves. This is where I’d love to help. Below you’ll find a step-by-step, detailed tutorial on how to login to your WordPress website, create a new post, save your working progress as a draft and finally publish your new post when you’ve completed your finishing touches. Let’s get started.

You’ll need the following before you begin this tutorial

WordPress Website with Access to Admin Panel

Logging In

When your WordPress website was installed it was given a specific URL to login through. Some themes have a “login” link in the front end of the website, such as the homepage, while others require the URL to login. The most common URL for logging in is in the form of “www.YourDomainName.come/wp-admin”. Use whichever method your theme/installation supports and login to the Admin Panel of your website. Your login credentials are a prerequisite to this tutorial, so if you’re lost here, email the person or company who installed your website and ask them for your “WordPress login credentials”.

Start a New Post Draft

When you login to your Admin Panel, you should see a menu bar to your far left. It will have a ton of tabs that are used to organize the various methods of managing your website. Look for the tab that reads “Posts” with a thumbtack icon next to it. This tab should be near the top and underneath the “Home” tab. Click on the “Posts” tab.

If your website has existing blog posts, you’ll see them listed here. If your website is brand new and this is your first blog post, you’ll likely see an example “My First Blog Post”. Either way, click on “Add New” in the top-left corner of the Posts screen.

Categories VS Tags

Categories and Tags are easily confused, but they’re really quite simple. Tags are simply subcategories of your predetermined categories. For instance, if you owned a blog that gave reviews on the latest gadgets and gizmos, you’d probably have categories such as Apple, Samsung, Nokia, Motorolla, ect… And your tags would include the subcategories in each blog post. For instance if you wrote a blog post about how awesome the new iPhone 6 is, you’d probably add tags like iPhone, IOS, Silver-iPhone, Gold-iPhone, Space-Grey-iPhone, ect…

Adding Images

Images are relatively easy to incorporate. Simply navigate to the Media tab on the far-left menu of your WordPress Dashboard. Once you click the tab you’ll be taken to a page that looks like the image above. You’ll see a list of any images you’ve added. You’ll also see a link at the top of the page that reads “Add New”. To include an image in your blog post, first upload your file via the Media Panel, then navigate to your blog post and click the image icon in the top bar of your visual editor.

Recovering Lost or Accidentally Deleted Work

Sometimes we do stupid things, like deleting our hard work. Obviously we don’t intend on throwing our hard work into the garbage, but if it happens there’s no need to pull your hair out at a, once again, blank drawing board. In the Posts panel of your WordPress dashboard there is a link for viewing all of the revisions you’ve made to your blog post. This is where saving-draft/publishing comes in as very important. Each time you save your draft, or publish/republish your post, it gets saved in the revisions section of your WordPress dashboard hop over to these guys. If you’ve been saving your work often and have accidentally deleted your work, you’ll be able to navigate to “revisions” and select the file of the last update you completed.

Previewing Your Work

If you’re using a visual editor to create the content for you post, then you’ll have a fairly decent idea of how your content is going to appear. On the other hand, if you’re getting a bit more technical with your content by adding html tags and custom CSS then you’ll definitely want to preview the page as a whole before you publish it. Luckily, WordPress 4.1 includes a “Preview” button at the top of the post editor. Make sure you save your draft for the changes to go into effect in the preview.

Publishing Your Post

Once you have your post dialed in the way you like it and you’ve previewed it to make sure, you should run down a checklist of things to double check prior to posting. Here’s a general list of things I always double check:

Categories

Make sure you’ve created and selected all of the categories your post applies to. Create new categories by navigating to Posts => Categories => Create New.
Tags

Include any tags that apply to your specific post. Make sure to be specific with your tags. For example, a post about Super Mario Brothers for Super Nintendo may include a tag that looks like this, “super-nintendo-mario-brothers-tricks”.
Links

If you’ve included any links to external or internal webpages, it’s generally a good idea to test them from the preview page. Make sure all of your links are working correctly prior to publishing your work.
Spelling & Grammar

This one’s a given, but definitely worth listing. It’s very tempting to neglect proof reading your entire post prior publishing; don’t do this!

References

wordpress.org