How to Make and Edit a Post in WordPress

Jamie Reilly May 27, 2013 · 7 min read

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Hi Everyone,

For this tutorial, we’re going to take a look at how to make and add a post in WordPress, including how to use a schedule, how to include images, different things like that.

So let’s go ahead and take a look. Right now, I’m in my dashboard. This shows you some information about your basic settings, add your content, customize your site, and so on. Let’s go ahead and jump right in with making a post, which is going to lead us to all the other things we can need and use in WordPress.

So I’m going to go ahead to posts, and go to add new. The first thing I’m going to want to do when I add a new post is add a good, catchy title. And this is going to be down below. We’re just going to type something in, just so we can get some content, and you can see how all these different parts work.

Okay. So I’ve typed in a little paragraph, there and let’s take a look at the different things we can get upload and all the different ways we can change all our posts.

You’ll see over here on the right we have a visual and an HTML version of this page. If you’re not sure about your HTML, you may just want to stick in the visual area. But if you know how to go into HTML and add different elements that you would use on a regular web page design, you can come in here and basically write in HTML. Let’s go ahead and work on the visual side for a moment.

First, I’m going to go in, select WordPress, and make it bold. So just like any other word processing program, you can make a bold, you can underline it, you can use a strikethrough, you can even make a list. If I were to type these three words, I can go in and I can put them in the list, or I can number them. I can also do a block quote if I want to, I can left align, middle align, right align, I can even put in a link.

So I would do that by selecting WordPress and clicking a link. And it’s going to ask what the URL is. So let’s say I want to put this to WordPress.org. I can put that in and you can choose whether to open a link in a new window, and that can be a good idea if you want to make sure people stay on your page, but can still access other links that you’ve put in there.

Or you can link it to existing content. I don’t have any existing content to list right now, so I’m going to go ahead and lead these two WordPress.org, I’m going to open a new link and a window, and I’m going to click on add link. And you can see that this comes across to the bright blue of a live link. I can also insert another tag, I can do a word check, I can toggle full screen mode, and I can show or hide the kitchen sink.

Now by clicking on that, you can see I can choose between what format I want for my paragraph, whether I want to underline it, whether I want to do a full align, which will fully align on both sides; you can choose the color of your text, you can choose whether if you want to paste as plain text or as Word, you can remove the formatting, you can insert a custom character, you can indent, you can undo, or you can ask questions. So right now I’m going to go ahead and left align those words, and I’m going to take a look at the upload and insert feature.

Now, you can use from your own computer, you can upload a picture, you can do it from a URL, or you can do it from the media library. Right now I don’t have anything uploaded, but let’s take a look at what I’ve got on my computer. You can click it and drop, or you can just go ahead and select a picture and it will compress it down and put it into your file. Underneath, if you scroll down, you can put it in as the title, and you can put alternate text, even put a caption that will appear underneath the picture, and you can put in a description.

It will also give you a link to a URL so you can pull from other web sites to this picture. You can align it, left to right, center, or no alignment at all, and you can choose which side you want to put it, and then you can put insert into post, and there you go. Then if you decide to change anything about this, you can click on your picture, click on the smaller picture that shows up, and this brings it up with your advanced settings.

You can use it as a link and it will link to this picture, or you can go into advanced settings and you can set up border, vertical space and horizontal space around your picture; you can also choose your style, your size if you want to type it in that way, and you can add a title, a relative link, CSS style, and a target, and click update.

If you want to get rid of it, click on the picture and click on the delete image, and let’s say I want to move it around. All I have to do is click and drag the picture to wherever I want to go. Now let’s take a look at our HTML code now that we have added this picture and changed these different things. So in HTML, you can see that we now have basic HTML language to put the site together. On the right side of the page, you’ll see that we can save draft, we can preview it. Lt’s go ahead and preview it to see what comes up. And there you go.

That’s a preview of my first page. If you’d like to, you can go ahead and publish and edit, you can change its status between draft and edit, you can change its visibility between public and edit, you can publish it immediately, or you can schedule it to, say, let’s publish tomorrow instead. And once you set the publishing date, click OK.

Now on the bottom, it will ask you about the format. If you want a standard format, an aside, a link, a gallery, a status, a quote, or an image. You can open a close any of these categories by simply clicking on the title bar. Next if you scroll down the page, you’re going to see the categories and tags. We’re going to get into those in the next tutorial because those are how people are going to find your posts according to what it is they’re looking for. So for instance, I would assign words that would go for categories and tags that deal with WordPress tutorials for this blog. Down at the bottom is the featured image. You can also take the picture that we just put in, and set it as a featured image.

You can see now that our gallery has one picture in it, and I can use this is a featured image. We then click there, and click on save all changes. You can also build up your own media library, and there are widgets that will allow you to do that. So let’s go ahead and schedule this, and now tomorrow this will show up on my posts. I’m going to click on posts over on the left hand side and it pops up on my post list. The first one that it does is just the standard hello world one, and that happens whenever you get your WordPress page.

You going to click on that, and I’m going to click on trash because I don’t need that to be on my page. So now my first page is this is WordPresstutorialhub first post, and it shows the author was me as the administrator. It shows my categories and my tags, and the date that it will be published, which is tomorrow.

Plus it shows if there are comments. You can set up your WordPress page to approve any comments before they’re allowed to be posted, and is always a good idea because spammers target WordPress pages. So that’s how you create a post in WordPress. So I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and see how really easy it is to go in and change any of these things. So thank you for listening and we’ll see you next time.