Now that you’ve created your website, you need to start putting content on it. To explore how to create a new post, we’ll publish an assignment along with a set of class notes (power point slideshow). 

Writing posts – like all administrative tasks on your blog – are performed through the dashboard. This is a private area that only you can access. In the dashboard, you can add/edit/delete posts, re-organize your posts, and change your theme, among other things.

Getting to the Dashboard

First thing we’ll need to do is log in and get to the dashboard.

Navigate to Wordpress.com. You’ll see a log-in box to the left labeled, “Already hip?” Fill in your user name and password to log in.

Once you’re logged into Wordpress.com, you’ll see a gray bar going across the top of the screen. This has a number of options – “My Account,” “My Dashboard(s),” “New Post.”

If you place the mouse over “My Dashboard(s),” you should see the name of your blog. Click on that to enter your blog’s dashboard.

You can also navigate directly to the dashboard for a particular site. Enter the blog’s domain name (i.e. mysite.wordpress.com) and then add ‘/wp-admin’ at the end. For the mysite domain, the full url would be http://mysite.wordpress.com/wp-admin.

If you bookmark this URL, you can get back to your dashboard quickly in the future. If you aren’t already logged in, it will prompt you to do so when you try to access the wp-admin page.

Creating a New Post

In the dashboard, you’ll see a lot of options. You may want to take some time to poke around and explore. 

When you’re ready to move on, find the Posts option in the column on the left. If you click on the little arrow, it will drop down a few options – Edit, Add New, Tags, and Categories. Click on Add New to bring up a blank post for you to edit.

To publish a basic post, fill in the Title box and type up your assignment in the main text area underneath the title. In the screenshot to the right, I just typed up a quick note that the students had a basic homework assignment.

When you’re satisfied with your work, click on the Publish button to the right. You’ll end up back on the same screen, but there will be a message up top that says, “Post published. View post.”

Click on the “View post“ link and you’ll see your brand new post!

Formatting Your Post

Although you could manually create the HTML to format your post, Wordpress does all of the hard work for you. By default, it just presents the information as plain text.

You can spice things up a bit with some extra formatting. Underneath the Title field are a handful of buttons to do so. These buttons make up the WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) editor for Wordpress.

For example, you can make a phrase boldface by highlighting the phrase and clicking the big “B” button. Hmm… does that seem familiar?

For the most part, these basic formatting options (Bold, Italic, Underline, Listing, etc) are done as if you were using a word processor. It should be fairly straightforward.

One button you’ll definitely want to take note of is the one that looks like a chain link. By highlighting a phrase and clicking this button, you can add a hyperlink to another webpage. All you have to do is copy the URL of the target page into the dialog box, and Wordpress automatically formats the link for you.

Uploading and Inserting Files

Next, let’s upload a file to include in our post.

Look at the four buttons labeled Upload/Insert. From left to right, these allow you to upload a picture, a video file, a music file, “other” files (i.e. Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets, pdf files, Power Point slideshows), and polls.

I’m going to add a Power Point slideshow, so I’ll click the fourth button from the left – the pointy sunburst icon.

This brings up an interactive form that lets me upload and label the file.

Click on the “Select File” button and find the file on your computer using the standard Windows Open File dialog box.

You’ll definitely want to fill in the “Title” and “Caption” fields. The “Title” will be the text that Wordpress uses when it creates a link to the file.

You can leave the “Description” box empty and leave the Link URL field alone. It defaults to “File URL,” which is what we want.

When you’re done, click “Insert into Post,” and a link will be created to your Power Point file (or other document).

Don’t worry about conserving space with these files. Wordpress gives you 3gb of storage on the server. That’s enough to hold a lifetime’s worth of Power Point slides and Word documents. Halfway through the year, I haven’t even come close to using 1% of that allowance (30mb).

Organizing Posts

There’s one last thing we’ll take a look at before we wrap up for the day: organizing your posts. 

You could just publish information on a daily basis without any organization. A patient student would be able to follow your archives backwards (or use the search box) and eventually find the right piece of information.

Or, you could use ome standard Wordpress features to help organize your information. The most important tool you have at your disposal for this is Categories.

While you’re writing up a post, there’s a box to the right labeled “Categories.” By default, there’s one category: Uncategorized.

You can create as many categories as you want to organize your posts, and you can put posts into multiple categories. Students can then view posts that are only in a selected category.

For example, you might want to create a category for your different types of assignments – Homework, Classwork, Projects, etc. You also might want to create a category for each Chapter or Unit.

Play Around. Explore.

We just explored some of the basic aspects of making a new post. However, you should play around with some of the other options – adding special formatting, embedding video files (like YouTube videos), uploading pictures, etc.

I’d also give some thought to how you want to organize your posts. Creating that organization structure ahead of time will help you stay organized later on.

When you done, move on to the next step and play around with the layout of your site.

Navigation Links

• Start Over: Table of Contents
• Next: Design Studio: Changing the Layout and Appearance of Your Site
• Previous: Creating a Site: Using Wordpress to Build Your Class Website