Design Counts

Starting out with WordPress – Using Posts

WordPress allows you to add web content by creating Posts and Pages. A post allows you to add web pages in a time line, one post will follow another.  Many people who use WordPress as a blogging platform will usually write using “Posts”. If you want to use WordPress as a way to create a traditional website – made up of web pages, then you will usually write using “Pages”. You should consider using “Pages” when the content is meant to be permanent.

Quick Summary

1. Use WordPress Posts when you want to create a time ordered entry to a blog or website.
2. Create and Use “Categories” for you posts.
3. Enhance WordPress search engine visibility for each post by using Permalinks that incorporate the “category” and “post name” in the url (web page address).
4. When giving a post a title, keep it short and relevant to the topic being written about – Good relevant titles + Good Content = good search engine optimisation.

Note: WordPress do not recommend the use of “Category” in the permalinks url as this can cause your blog / website to slow down especially if it is a large blog and has a lot of visitors. One possible solution to this is to use WP Super Cache by Donncha O Caoimh - this WordPress Plugin creates a html cache of your pages and posts, greatly increasing the speed of loading pages.

WordPress can of course be used where permanent web pages exist along with articles / content that has been written using posts. A post will eventually be archived and not be visible on the main area of the website, you can however enable posts to be found easily by using categories to group the posts by areas or topics of interest.

Categories – Give your post a relevant Category

Before you start to write posts you can sit down with a piece of paper and write down the areas or topics you plan to write about, this will usually follow your own areas of interest. For example if your blog / website is about gardening then you may consider creating “Categories” to cover some of the topics you plan to write about. This will then allow you to add a category to each blog post so that your readers will be able to easily find posts about a specific topic.

As an example for a Gardening Blog – you could have categories set up such as:

• Flowers
• Vegetables
• Flower arranging
• Propagation
• Growing under Glass
• Pests and Diseases
• Garden Books
• Garden Diary

You could have many other categories depending on your interests and what you plan to write about.

WordPress installs with a default category called “uncategorized” and you can edit this and change its name to something more relevant to your blog / website.

Search Engine Friendly

You can help make your blog / website more search engine friendly by using relevant categories for your posts, this can then be used to create the url path name to your post using WordPress Permalinks Settings– and incorporate the category into the url (website page) address.

To add a category select “Posts” in the left hand WordPress menu bar and the menu below the Posts will appear with the following options:

Edit

Add New

Post Tags

Categories

Select the Categories option to bring up the Categories page in WordPress. From this page you can select and edit existing categories, or add a new category.

Change the default Wordress Post Entry

WordPress is installed with an example Post, Page and Comment set up for you to see what they look like. You can delete all of these and start again, yet it is just as easy to edit the first Post and put in your own title and content. At the same time change the default “Category” to something more relevant to your blog or website. The default comment can and in my opinion be deleted. See more about comments under the WordPress Comments page.

After you have editied the first post you can then simply select Posts > Add New to create new posts. WordPress also enables you to send entries from your mobile phone and to use the QuickPress from the front page of your websites Dashboard.