After spending numerous hours explaining to many clients how to use the wordpress platform I thought it would be helpful to produce a basic guide to using and performing basic functions, whilst most people do know how to do it I thought it would be a good idea to document for those who have forgotten through lack of use or those who are new to the wordpress platform.

Logging in

The first hurdle will be to get into the admin area, you will have been given a link and a user name and password already but if you are not sure of the link most domains admin web address will be your domain name then /wp-admin/ so for example www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/. From here you can enter your credentials and on success will be taken to the admin area (or other area if you have a redirect rule on).

Adding a post

Another basic that will become like second nature when done a few times. From the admin home page (dashboard), on the left hand side of the page there will be a posts link, hover over this (if you’re on wp 3 or above) and a dropdown of options will appear, choose the ‘Add New’ option and this will take you to the add new post page.

From here you can add a title in the ‘Enter title here’ input box and below this is the text editor box, to make life easier make sure the visual tab is selected (you will need to know basic HTML for the HTML tab), in here you can put your post content, maybe it would be a news article post so you would put your  news content in the text editor area. You have the option to add media (pictures or video) with the button just above the text editor area.

Remember to categorise your post, fo example if this was a news article you would categorise it in that category, if that category doesnt exist you can add a category, the categories are on the right hand side of the page.

Adding a page

This is very similar to adding a post, find the pages link in the left hand navigation, then click add new, here you will presented with a simiar page to the add post page, similar to this you will hve to fill in the ‘page title’ and then populate the page with text from the text editor pane.

You will not have categories but you can however choose a parent page for this page if the page was belonging to another page, you can also selected a page template which you might have different layouts on if you have had that configured for you.

Adding an Image

From the left nav click media then click ‘Add New’, dependent on what browser you have, you might see an image like the one shown or you could just see a select files button, if you see the ‘Drop files here’  you can simply drag the files from your computer into that area on the web page and it will upload the image automatically. If you only have the select files button this is pretty simple too, just click that button and it will pop up the normal style file locator, simply select your image from your computer and submit and this will initiated the same process.

Once the image has loaded you will see a list of options for your image, the most important of these is ‘title’ and ‘alt’, make sure these are filled in and represent a description of your image, this is for accessibility, some users are unable to see images and have tools to read to them the description.

If you are on the post page when you are trying to add an image (most likely you will be) then you will also see some option to insert into post, you will see an array on image sizes select the most suitable for you and click insert into post, that’s it.