A blog is often a mixture of what is happening in a person’s life and what is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary/guide site, although there are as many unique types of blogs as there are people.

As this is essentially the same as adding a post I am going to refer you to that information.

The only difference is that you won’t see a place for adding tags or categories. That because pages have a different role to posts and therefore don’t get tagged or categorised in the same way.

You can however, have sub-pages and templates. The links to these sit in the right hand column and allow you to create a Page say “About” and then add sub pages about say the staff. About John, About Karen, etc…

Templates are created at the design stage and allow you to style a page to do certain things. e.g. Taking a look at tags again! We could create a page called tags and then use a template to list all the tags. That is a simple use of the template function but if you want to know more talk to your designer.

Adding an image or any additional content is as simple as clicking on one of the links alongside the words Upload/Insert, just above this content box.

The icons in this order allow you to upload:

• Images
• Video
• Audio
• Media

Media is such things as documents, pdfs etc.

Click on the add an image button and you will see this:

Click on select file and you will be able to navigate to the image you want to upload. When you have found it click on it and press select and it will upload.

You will now see this image:

It is best to experiment with the settings and get an idea of what they do. But very quickly, for seo purposes change the title from d34536_imgurtg.jpg to something more search engine friendly, like Picture showing a bridge swaying in the wind. Caption adds a caption to the image. It generally sits just below the image. Description adds a description. (both these options need to be programmed into the theme – designer’s job). If we skip link url for the minute and look below, we see alignment and size. Alignment has nice little diagrams to describe what happens there and image is the size of the image you want to display. This is where link url comes in, for instance you can select thumbnail and then add a link url – then when you click on the image it will open a new page showing the full image. Or if you click on one of my images – that can happen. But if you want it to happen you need to ask your designer.

Whilst this is titled adding a post, it also includes editing. To add a post, click on the add a post link, to edit a post, click on the post title itself or the edit link. There is two ways to delete a post, firstly in the post listing and secondly in the post itself. The delete link is in the right hand column.

When adding or editing a post there are several areas that can be completed.

1. The title
2. The content
3. Post tags
4. Categories

Most of the above are self-explanatory. There is a difference between tags and categories. Categories are not tags and tags are not categories but they do similar things. Tags have an importance in terms of search engine optimisation (seo) and also keywords. The best way to use them is to think of a general category such as news and then use tags to define posts within that category. So you might have youth, cars, computers all as tags within the category news. Some might say why not use sub-categories? You can. But in terms of seo it is more effective to use tags. It also helps your site navigation.

For instance let’s say we have two categories, one called news and one called sport. Within those categories we use a tag called youth. As a visitor to your site I could click on the tag youth and get a load of posts relating to youth or I could click on sport.

I don’t want to go on but here is a simple list to help you further:

• Tags can be categories, categories aren’t tags
• Tags are usually one word (youth), categories can be longer (Youth News or Guide to using WordPress)
• Tags help search engines, categories don’t

One final word. Categories will help visitors navigate your site far more effectively. So rather than have a category called news, I would be far more specific, e.g. Lostwithiel News and Surrounding areas. Then within that have a tag called news. The visitor can instantly see the category and can travel there or if they want to see more posts relating to news they can click on that tag.

There are other areas within the post such as the excerpt, trackbacks, custom fields, etc but these need wider coverage and will be dealt with at a later date.

This series is here to help you use and manage your wordpress site. It assumes that you will be logging in as an admin user. I encourage people to use a good web browser such as Safari or if you prefer it Firefox. Both browsers support tabbed browsing and it is this element that I think is particularly useful. I suggest people open two tabs, the first one to do admin work and the second one to view the site and to view the work you are doing.

So if you have your tabs open, navigate to your site on both tabs. In the first tab after your site name, add wp-admin:

http://sitename.co.uk/wp-admin

If you are already logged in you will go straight to the dashboard, if not you will be asked to log in. You will need your user name and password in order to log in.

After logging in you will arrive at the dashboard as shown above. The column to the left is your navigation column. For ease of use I have shown what happens if you log in as admin. However, if you log in as a different level of user such as editor you will see a different navigation structure.

The areas of particular interest are posts and pages. The main difference between the two is permanence – posts are dated and therefore get archived, pages are permanent and don’t get archived. So if you want to post a piece of news this would go into posts. If you wanted to write an about us page, this would go into pages.