Posts
This is the core of your site, the place where all the magic happens, where you convert your visitors to sellers, or not. Writing posts (articles, sales pitches, product reviews, etc) is the life blood of an internet marketing website. The posts section is where you create the posts, review existing posts and drafts and sort your categories and tags out.
Lets look at the different options in turn.
All posts
Here you can see all the existing posts and there status: published, draft, etc. You can filter your posts by dates and categories and bulk quick edit them or delete them.
At a glance you can see each posts Title, Author (should you have multiple), Categories, Tags, number of Comments and Published Date.
All of these can be turned on/off via Screen Options in the top right.
Hovering over a Post title gives further options: Edit, Quick Edit, Delete and View. These are self explanatory for the most part, but the difference between Edit and Quick Edit is that the Quick Edit only allows you to change details Like title, category and tags rather than the actual content of the post.
Other plugins add further features to this screen, for example All in One SEO, adds the SEO title, keywords and description that you have added, useful to see if you have missed any!
Add New
Here is where you write your masterful copy, the articles that will convince your visitors to click through that affiliate link or to buy your product.
It fairly straight forward to use. Add a title, add your content, choose or create a category, add some tags and hit publish. Obviously there’s more to it than that, but that’s the general gist of it.
Post Box
This is the big white box and it has an options bar at the top reminiscent of Microsoft Word, and mostly they are text editing features, like bold and align etc.
The two key ones to note are the More button and the Kitchen Sink button.
The More button inserts a shortcode tag into the post and what this does is when the post is viewed, instead of showing it all it shows up to the more tag and then the user has to click a Read more/continue reading link to get to the rest of the article. It’s a manual excerpt creator.
The Kitchen Sink button’s only function is to open up a secondary line of options. these are still quite straight forward, with a text formatter for heading sizes, justify and insert custom characters. No idea why its hidden, as its all useful stuff, but there ya go.
Above the buttons is a small text link, Upload/Insert. this is where you can add media – images, videos,etc. Note that when you insert the media, it will go wherever the cursor is in the main text box.
On the right is two tabs, Visual and HTML. The visual is where you start, but if you want to customise any html directly in the individual post.
Manual Excerpts
Some themes use excerpts (normally the first 55 words) of an article rather than displaying the full post. This box is where you can write a different excerpt if you so wish.
Custom Fields
This is where you can add custom fields to your posts. These van be really useful and powerful. Basically you can add extra Meta data to your posts, i.e. in a post about reviweing the latest HD TVs you could add custom fields that say:
- Size: 40”
- Hertz: 60hz
- Price: $499
It of course depends on your theme as to whether they show up or not, so you would have to look into it. I know that a lot of Elegant Themes make use of custom fields really well.
Publish
Here you can publish the post, or set it as a draft or even schedule it to publish at a later date.
Categories
This is where you select what category your post will be attached to. You can also create a category from here too in case you forgot to do so before hand.
Tags
Add tags to the post that are relevant. Create them or choose from the most used ones.
Featured Image
Some themes make great use of featured images, for example the InReview theme which uses them on the front page and the post page.
Adding one is the same system as putting an image into the post, but you click add as featured image rather than insert into post. Simplez.
Categories
WordPress works on the basis that posts are attached to categories, so that they are ordered. Even if you don’t attach one it will automatically attach it to the Uncategorized category. Having a well thought out category system, maybe even with subcategories can make creating your navigation really easy and allow users to navigate easily too which makes them want to stay and look at your well crafted content!
To create one simply enter a name and click Add New Category. WordPress will automatically add a slug for you.
If you want it to become a subcategory, select a previous category from the Parent dropdown before you click add (or just edit the category if you made a mistake).
The description field isn’t used very often but can be used to great effect. If you check this theme out and look at the text below ‘Mens Clothing’, ‘Interior Design’ etc that is the description field in action.
Tags
You can create tags here, in a very similar way to Categories, but unless you already know the tags you’re going to use, you’re better off just adding them directly to the post as you’re about to publish it.