Making Posts Pretty – WordPress Website Design for the Absolute Beginner

Making Posts Pretty – WordPress Website Design for the Absolute Beginner

Okay!! Welcome back. In the last video we differentiated between posts and pages and in this video I want to take a closer look at entering data into a post. From my experience you probably enter data for anywhere between five and 10 pages. But if you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing and adding content on a regular basis for SEO purposes you should be adding lots of posts.

So let’s take a look at adding a new post. If we go to posts and we go to all posts you can see all the post we’ve done so far. And you can select the button for add new. If you’re not on this page if you’re somewhere else within the site, you could also easily get to posts by mousing over new and going to post. And that’s what I just did. So here we are at add new post. So the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to say the post title goes here, so I often tell my clients that adding content to a WordPress site is as easy as sending an email. Essentially you’ve got a subject line and you’ve got a body and you’ve got a button to push. It’s really that easy. So the post title goes here. I’m going to cut and paste some Lorem Ipsum in there just some dummy text and we’ve got two options at this point. You can either save draft or publish. But I want to show you something. Here’s a secret. You see there’s a little button right here? Back in the old fun days of WordPress it used to be called the kitchen sink it’s not called the kitchen sink any more, it’s now called the toolbar toggle and if I click on it you see I get a whole mother row of icons. So generally you only have to hit that once and it should be the default now for you. But make sure you know about this stuff because this has got a whole bunch of things that were going to be using later which is really going to help you with your content. Alright so we’ve got some text in here we’ve got a title in here; what else do we have? That’s pretty much it. And I’m going to go up here and I’m going to say save draft and now we can preview the post and take a look and there it is, here is our post.

Now because we hit preview post it opened up in a new tab so I’m gonna to go ahead and click that to get back to where we were. But let’s trece this post up a little bit. Let’s say for example that we want to add an image to our text. Alright so in order to add an image I’m going to go ahead left click to get my cursor blinking next to the Lorem Ipsum and I’m going to go to add media; this little button right here, click it and there are no media in my library cuz It’s a brand new site. So it’s asking me: hey where on your hard drive do you want me to get this media from? So let’s go ahead and click on it and how about a nice picture of a cow? So I click the picture of the cow, I click the open button and there’s my picture of a cow. And over here I can see the size: medium, full size if I want to go full size. Let’s stick with the medium one and I can put a caption if i want; cool cow huh.

Now alt text is for a visually impaired. It’s always a good idea to add alt text to your images that way people who are using the Internet who are visually impaired, they, they use special software and they mouse over your image of a cow, it’ll tell them it’s a cow.

I’m going to go ahead and put a description of the cow in there too. Now I want to say insert in a post. Oh no that looks horrible. So let’s make it not look horrible. If my mouse over my cow and I left click, look what I can do here I can align the text around the image. I’m going to go with a nice a line left and as you can see my text is now aligned beautifully around my cow.  Little pencil is for edit, I can align left, center, right; I can go into advanced options but I’m okay with the way it looks and there we go. So now let’s save draft and let’s look at our cow post by previewing post and look at that we can slick alright. So let’s come back to it, let’s talk about another thing that we’re going to want to do pretty frequently with our posts is we might want to change the color of our fond. Now luckily WordPress is super easy to use and all I need to do is put my cursor where I want to put it, I’m left clicking, I’m dragging and I’m letting go. So we want to bold that, just hit the button or the B icon and now Lorem Ipsum is bold. Well how about philosopher Cicero? I think that’s pronounced Cicero Let’s get philosopher Cicero let’s make the philosopher red. So if I got a text color and I left click ooh look at all those pretty colors. I’m gonna  to go ahead and make it red and I’m going to make it bold and I’m going to make it italicized And then when I click off of it you’ll see that all those changes have been made. So I can save draft and go into the draft and show you. But I think you’re starting to get the gist of it. So let’s take it one step further.

What if we wanted to say more info on cows at www.cows.com got, I don’t know what cows.com is going to pull up. I have no idea whatsoever. So say for example I want to link to the website www.cows.com. Now I have no idea what that’s going to bring up. But let’s take a chance. I left click and drag to highlight it and I’m going to go into insert/ edit link and I’m going to click on it and then I’m going to type in http://www.cows.com and hit enter. And now this is a hyperlink to cows.com. So let’s go see how that looks, after we save draft and preview post; here we go cows.com. Now as I mouse over cows.com you’ll see down here in the bottom left hand corner where it says cause dot com.

So let’s click on cows.com and see where it takes us and it takes us to authentic western wear. So did you notice the problem with what we just did? You know we worked so hard to get people to our website and I just linked out and I linked to this classical Western style website, but once they closed this box my web site’s going to close too. So that is not the ideal way to add a link on your site. Let’s go back to cows.com and let’s use this little pencil to edit it and I’m going to grab this http, copy it. Now at this time I’m gonna hit the cog and I’m going to get link options and you’ll see right here it says open link in a new tab. If I click that, when they go to cows.com my website will still be behind the cows.com website so don’t forget where they came from and the last thing you want to do after you work so hard to get people to your website is send them away, have them click out and then forget where they were in the first place.

So if I hit update and then I hit save draft and then I come over here to preview post, check this out. I’m gonna come up, I’m going to click on cows.com but watch these up here in the upper, upper, upper left hand corner, it’s going to add a new tab. This page is going to continue to be here and the cows.com page will come up. So let’s click it and there we go: Classic old Western styles wholesaler manufacturer. So he has sent them to cows.com for whatever reason, they went around and they looked at stuff, they’ve decided to click out of it and oh look at this our website still here. So I’m a huge advocate of making sure that you take that extra step to add the link in a new window.

Alright what else can we do? We’ve really done a lot here, we’ve accomplished a ton but there’s so much more we can do. I love cows because and I’m gonna hit enter. But you know what else I can do? I can do a bulleted list by using this button right here. Who doesn’t think cows are cute? I mean seriously. Oh come on you know you’re thinking it. Alright there we go, Peter don’t call me. Okay so that’s a bulleted list. You can also do the same thing with a numbered list as well if you wanted him to be 1, 2, 3, 4 by clicking there and you change your mind too I didn’t know that until just now.

Alright so we’ve done a lot here, talked about links; Oh we can, we can align stuff; we can do special characters like you might have to do a copyright. I don’t know if that’s a real website or not but copyright. And I think you get the general gist; it’s very, very similar to Microsoft Word or any other word editor.

I hope that I have conveyed to you how unbelievably easy it is to create a WordPress website and add content. So I’m Steve signing off until the next video. Hope to see you there.