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Becoming immediately productive with WordPress is not hard! There are no tricks to accomplishing that, either. The reason is simple: The edit window, where you’ll do most of your work, is very much like any normal word processing program you already know.
Yes, it’s true, I don’t have to say much to get you started, then, but of course there are always things to show such as tips ‘n tricks, shortcuts, and the few things that are a bit ‘special purpose’ and unusual. Right away you probably recognize several buttons, like “B” for bold, “I” for italic, etc. Just start typing, use the buttons you know, and you are doing fine in seconds with no lessons at all – just the way it should be. But very quickly you will want more. Formatted columns, images, audio or video, and so forth are not so obvious and there are some nasty traps. Let’s take a look… |
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Two Traps to Avoid First, WordPress ‘out of the box’ does not provide any control over how to format your pages or posts inside the main content area. If you need to have content in columns or boxes, etc, you are out of luck. Luckily there are some easy solutions.
You can upgrade the ‘default’ editor many ways, but one of the best (which ought to be standard, perhaps) is to install the TinyMCE Advanced plugin. It takes a few minutes to set up, but it’s worth it. TMCEA gives you the ability to add editing controls (such as tables, insert horizontal lines) that are missing from the default. You can also solve this problem by editing in a program on your computer, then using copy and paste… which introduces the second nasty surprise you wouldn’t see coming. Copy-and-pasting your content from somewhere else, like Microsoft Word, gives Microsoft the chance to introduce MS programming into what you copy. Microsoft programming is not universally interpreted correctly by all web browsers, so you can have problems. Again, the solution is simple. WordPress has a ‘copy from Word’ button that will remove much of the improper code from things you copy and paste from a Microsoft-based computer. There’s even a ‘paste as plain text’ button to totally strip all formatting from text you copy from elsewhere. If for some reason you still have formatting issues, try starting over by simply erasing all formatting with the special-purpose format eraser. |
Tables, HTML and WordPress… WordPress themes use “style sheets” to control display. Images may have odd spacing, tables may show unusual or unpredictable borders or margins / text padding. Unless you learn to control these aspects of design, you won’t be able to change the way these things work.
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Adding Images, Video, etc.
 Images: The built-in image library in WordPress is really good:
Upload pictures while you’re writing Resize images while you’re working Align your image (so text flows around it) |
 Videos, audio, and documents: Other media controls in the top row button group are by no means as powerful… These just make a link.
To better treat your media, you may want to get a plugin anyway because they are ‘special purpose’ for what you want to do – but to ‘embed’ media into your site, use the little green filmstrip button.
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 Use the image editor button to access image editing controls after you’ve inserted an image.
This is also where you can make images into buttons, with ‘rollover’ effects. |
How to make best use of the edit window, also known as
“Stupid Editor Tricks – Part One”
 You’ve heard the expression ‘everything but the kitchen sink’, I bet. Well, WP has a kitchen sink, and you can throw that in, too!
It’s just the button that opens the editing panel all the way so you can see all the buttons… but it’s called ‘the kitchen sink’.  The special character button helps you type characters that aren’t on your keyboard, like ∏, ë, and ≥.
 There are two buttons like this. The first adds a ‘more’ tag so that on pages with several posts, only a part of your story shows. That way readers can see the first bit of many articles and decide which to read more of. The second one splits a long article into pages so readers don’t have to endlessly scroll down. |
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Now you are armed and ready to write!
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Soon, I’ll get into more depth about images and media controls, as websites must have ‘eye candy’ to keep people interested!
Online, remember that people don’t like to read… they like to watch or look! See you next time!
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