Adding Posts (News Items, Articles)

Posts are what WordPress is all about. Although you may not realize it, you see them daily in your search engine travels. They appear as news items, how-to articles, announcements and more.

Your website software has built-in tools for creating these posts and it’s probably the easiest thing to do. If this feature has been included in your website package we’ve designed the “master” blog/news/articles page to display a collection of these posts along with a menu of “archived” posts.

1. To add a NEW POST, mouseover “Posts” (Dashboard, left column), select “Add New.”
2. Add a Title in the top field. This title should be relevant to your article and if possible, should contain a keyword or keyphrase for search engine purposes.
3. In the right column of your screen, under “Categories” select “News” or an appropriate keyword for your article. If the category doesn’t exist create it by typing a category into the field and selecting “Add New.”
4. When creating the content for your article, if you’re typing the content directly into the WordPress Text Editor, and you see the label “CONTENT,” highlight it beginning with the “O”, pull to the right and start typing. After you’re finished go back and remove the first letter “C.”
5. If you’re using a Word doc or other document to copy from, highlight your content from the document, right click and copy. Next, in the text editor highlight the label “CONTENT,” (if it appears) beginning with the second letter… pull to the right. Right click and paste your content, then delete that “C.”
6. Add any photos/images/PDF’s (see also “Adding Media“). Add a “Featured Image” if desired. NOTE: Featured images help you with the search engines and will appear with any site links you might add on Facebook. They will ALSO appear on the main “News…” page as part of the list, and possibly draw attention to the post.
   1. To add a featured image, once you’ve created your new post, scroll down and look on the far right of the screen for “Featured Image.” Simply click “Set featured image” and either select from the Media Library or upload a new one.
7. When you’re finished click the blue “Publish” button. If you had already published the post, click “Update” to save any changes made.
8. Check your work by “previewing” (upper right button) or viewing your “News” page and selecting the new item.

CHANGING POST ORDER

There are 2 options for changing the order in which posts appear and they depend on installed plugins. 1) Dragging/dropping them within the list of posts (“Posts” screen)* OR 2) changing the “Published” date, which is more reliable:

1. To drag/drop, mouseover the left end of the post title and you should see a crosshair. Simply single-click and drag.
2. To change the published date, in the list of “Posts,” mouseover the title and select “Quick Edit.” On the left side you’ll see the title and 2 lines down, the date. Just select a date &/or time that is before the previous post (or wherever you want the post moved).

*Ask your developer if “Custom Intuitive Post Order” (or similar) has been installed.