Your first blog post

One more thing about images before starting to write.

If you click Media in the left sidebar and add new, you will come to your WordPress uploader. So if you want to use it for your photos or videos in your blog, go right ahead. It won’t take the place of FTP for anything else, though.

Now it’s time to write. Log in to your dashboard, if you are not already there. You can start a New blog post by clicking the down arrow in the Posts button on the upper right-hand side of the window or the one in the left sidebar. I don’t know about you, but my title is going to be Test Post. You should probably pick something that sounds less like a tutorial blog.

When you click down in the main textarea and start typing, you will see your permalink to that post appear. If you change your mind and change your title, you can click the edit button to edit it. Post names in the permalink need to be in the same format as slugs. So my post name is currently /test-post/. If I wanted to change the title to This Is A Test Post, the name slug in the permalink could be /this-is-a-test-post/. You can’t use symbols and punctuation except for hyphens in the post name slug.

Type several paragraphs.

If you want a picture, upload one and code it like this:

<img src="photo link url">

If you want a small photo with text running alongside it, you will need to add an align attribute to the image to align it to the left or the right.

<img src="photo link url" align="left" >

or

<img src="photo link url" align="right" >

When you are finished with your post, go to the right sidebar. You probably want to add a category or two for your post. Categories are something you expect to write a lot of posts for, that people may later want to sort through your posts to find all of one type. Click the +Add New Category link, enter the new category, and click the button. New categories you add while writing a post will be automatically selected.

Go down to the Post Tags. Tags are not limited to something you may expect to write a lot of. You can add all your tags at the same time, by putting commas between them. You can use multiple word tags and category names, too.

Now scroll down to the All in one SEO Pack box at the bottom of the page. Enter your post title at the top, a 160 character or less description, and keywords at the bottom. Some themes nowadays may already be optimized. Others are not. Don’t worry about it right now.

Now scroll back up and click the Preview button in the Publish section of the right-hand sidebar. A new tab or window should open with your preview in it. If you like it, publish. If not, keep editing it until you have it as you like it.

One more thing. If you click the Edit link next to Publish immediately, you can change the publishing date of your post to any other date in the past you want. If you pick a date in the future, your post will post automatically at that time. So you can write your posts ahead of time and have them post for you on a schedule.

I’m done for now. Feel free to make requests.