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How To Guide: Getting Started on WordPress (WordPress Tutorial)
Written by Hannah
Hello! And welcome to our blogs, and thank you for sharing your musical passions with us. This is a little guide to help you through starting your blogging (mainly for the Voices crew, if anyone else is reading – although, obviously you’re more than welcome to take notes too…).
Start by going to www.abubillamusic.com/wp-admin Here you can log in. You will arrive at your Dashboard which shows you a number of things: number of posts, recent comments, any recent drafts. On the left hand side is the navigation bar. To create a new post, click on ‘Posts’ and then ‘Add New’ (you can also play around to see what else you can do).
And then you’ll get to this page that I’m working on right now. There is a bar at the top for the title of your blog, be it ‘Song Discovery’ or ‘How to guide:…’ and beneath that the main blogging space. Start blogging!
Linking: Now, say you want to refer your reader to a song on Youtube (let’s say, ‘Hero’ by Enrique Iglesias), instead of copying and pasting the whole URL like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koJlIGDImiU you can make your text a link to that page directly, cutting out all the horrible computer speak. Highlight the text you want to make into a link (so, “‘Hero’ by Enrique Iglesias’), and click on the icon on the formatting bar that looks like 3 links in a chain. Paste the URL in the box that starts with ‘http://’ – be careful not to repeat that ‘http://’ bit after pasting – on the next line, from the drop down menu you can choose how you want the link to appear – would you like it to replace your blog or open in a new window? – and on the next line down you can give the link a title. This is the bit of information that would appear if someone were to hover over the link. As for the ‘Class’, I’m afraid I don’t know what this is. Sorry.
The ‘Excerpt’ function: when you start writing your blog, give a little introduction, and put in the box below the blogging space: The Excerpt. This will appear under the title of your blog on the website, and will encourage a reader to click on ‘Read more’ to see the entire blog post. Very neat.
Featured Image: Oo this is cool! Okay so next to your blog title on the website when it comes up you can have a little photo, that generally should have some relevance. This one, as you may notice, has a little picture of a speech bubble saying BLOG in it. For obvious reasons. Choose the picture you want and have the file ready. Click on the link that’s on the right hand side of your screen when you scroll down saying “Set featured image”. When you click on this it opens your image gallery, upload the file and “show” it’s information. Then choose to set it as your featured image! This is a similar process to just inserting an image into your blog, here’s how to do that.
Tagging: Tagging your blogs is a way of driving traffic to them. The more anyone on our system uses the same tag, the bigger the post tag will appear in the Tag Cloud (see the right hand side column on our blog pages). It is also a way for someone browsing the blogs to filter them. So, if you’ve written a whole blog about Laura Marling, start typing ‘L-a-u-r-a’ in the ‘Post Tags’ box on the right hand side of your editing page. If the word has been used before (on our WordPress system), you will be prompted – a bit like with predictive text. Keep tagging the relevant things, then click ‘Add’.
Categorising: This is for our Voices crew specifically. Once you’ve written your blog, please select the Voices category in the ‘Categories’ section again on the right hand side of your editing screen (below the tagging section), and then select your specific sub-category beneath it. We will link our Voices page on the website to this category, so please remember! If your an assistant (in which case you could really be writing about anything) than most likely you’ll be putting a blog in one of the options on our blog grid. When you scroll down the categories you’ll get to “3. Our Website”, A. is Main Categories, and you could put something on out homepage or on the main blog page if its an important one, otherwise go to B. “Blog 5 X 5 Cats” where you can choose where the blog goes in this fabulous grid. <<< look there’s a link!! Yay.
Publishing: Once you’ve finished, everything’s linked, tagged and categorized, you can publish! Use the ‘Publish’ box on the right hand side of your editing screen for options on Previewing or Saving your hard work. If you’re happy with everything, go ahead and publish. Or maybe you can schedule it for later in the week! The option is there. A bar will appear at the top of the screen giving you the option to view what you’ve just done, so you can always correct any mistakes then.
Et voila! Happy blogging. Don’t forget to use the other How to Guides for help on embedding images and videos too…