Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Don't Know Where To Start With Wordpress? These Tips Can Help!

By Dougherty Trent


WordPress is the most popular blogging website for a reason. The program is easy to use and provides so many options for making your blog stand out and look just the way you want it to. However, you need to know how to use the site to get the most from your experience. Follow the simple tips below to make WordPress work for you.

Familiarize yourself with the options and tools available on WordPress. For instance, the button "kitchen sink" gives you a plethora of choices for formatting and importing content into your posts. Also check out "screen options" for admin functions. Using this will help you better manage any formatting issues.

Remember to make your sidebar as concise and clean as possible. You don't want it to be full of 100 links, ads and buttons. Instead, only put what is important in your sidebar and, if you need more links, put them into submenus which appear when the user mouses over your main menu.

Use the "ABC" button to spell check your posts before they go live. Many people overlook this ability, but Wordpress can spell check your work for you. This ensures that you continue to give off a professional look with your posts and yet you don't have to use a separate program to do so.

If you haven't customized your WordPress sidebar, it could be cluttered with useless items that are doing nothing but confusing your readers. Your sidebar should only contain things you actually want visitors to click on. Navigate to Appearance & Widgets to edit the appearance of your sidebar and remove anything there that doesn't actually benefit you or your visitors directly.

If you want to create a line break, but not a paragraph break, hold shift while you press the enter key. This moves the cursor down to the next line without including any blank space. If you want to put a letterhead-type address on your page, this should make it a snap.

Want to change authors on a post? Just edit the post and click on "Screen Options". Next, choose Author and then choose whomever you want to become the author of the post. Next, click "update" or "publish" to finish the change and have it go live on your website and you're done.

Images make your blog look beautiful; however, the images can also help your site rank higher among search engines. One of the easiest ways to do this is to add keywords to your title tag and alternate tags. Both of these tags should contain precise keywords in order to rank your site appropriately.

When you are choosing a Wordpress template to use, pick something that gets frequent updates. You do not want to use a template whose creator has abandoned updates because sometimes you have to address security issues. A creator who is proactive in updating his template will give you a better product.

Be sure to choose unique, difficult to hack passwords and keep them secure. It doesn't matter if you are a free WordPress blogger of a paid, self-hosted WordPress blogger: it is important to keep your passwords strong and secure. In this way, you will not have to waste valuable time cleaning up sabotage and changing passwords. This will help ensure that your blog is a success.

As you begin getting comments on your posts, consider allowing people to post with an avatar. It helps your site feel like more of a community, and it only takes a minute to do. Simply go to the settings area of your dashboard and then click on "discussion." You should see the option there to enable avatars.

Wordpress has served as a content-posting workhorse for many years and is a favorite of innumerable bloggers from all walks of life. But, there are still many features of Wordpress that ought to receive increased attention. Now that you have reviewed the above article, you should be ready to give some of them a try.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment