Creating a Blog with Wordpress

Congratulations on your decision to start a blog! Below you can find a detailed instruction
manual on how to develop and design your blog using Wordpress. While this document does not
delve into every possible thing you can do on your blog, or discusses the use of HTML on your
blog, it does cover the basics of Wordpress how-to to make setting up your blog straightforward
and easy.

Table of Contents
1. Introduction
a. Our theme
b. Dashboard
c. Visual vs HTML
2. Authors
a. Setting up new profiles
b. Adding users
c. Changing author of a post
3. Calendars
a. Calendar widget
b. Adding a calendar
4. Categories
a. Adding categories of posts
5. Fonts
a. Changing font type, size, and color
6. Links
a. Adding hyperlinks
b. Adding links to other pages
c. Adding links to other websites on your homepage
d. Adding PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint documents, etc
7. Media Library
8. Pages
a. Adding new pages
b. Editing existing pages
c. Ordering the pages
d. Page within a page
9. Photos
a. Inserting photos
b. Editing photos
10. Posts
a. New posts
b. Editing posts
c. Tags
11. Settings
12. Statistics
a. General statistics
b. Top Posts and Page statistics
c. Akesmit statistics
Introduction
- Our theme
o When you start your blog on Wordpress, you have to choose a theme. You can
explore the various options, and decide which one works for your blog; some of
the themes are free and some you have to pay for.
o A good rule of thumb is “the simpler the better”
o Different themes have different capabilities and may be outlined a little
differently. The instructions written out in this document are for use with our
theme.
o Our theme: Twenty-ten
- Dashboard
o The “Dashboard” is your home-base. From there you can find anything and
everything you need for designing and editing your blog. When you are looking at
your dashboard, you will see different tabs on the left side of the screen.
- Visual vs HTML
o When you are inserting text into either a page or a post, you are provided with
two viewing options: Visual or HTML
o At the top of your text box you can switch between the two options.
o Depending on your skill level and with HTML coding, you can decide which
option is best for you. There are limitations in using either view, so the choice is
up to you.

Authors
- Setting up new profiles
1. Dashboard  Users  Invite Users
2. Email will be sent to the new user
3. User should follow the link on the email sent by wordpress
4. Select option for “sign up with just a username” which is located under the
“username” box
 Or, follow this link:
https://en.wordpress.com/signup/?user=1&u=47a2a3972036473ce2e083b
48d82cdab
5. Create an account with username and password
6. Update first and last name as well as a short bio under “about you”
7. Upload a picture
- Adding users
1. Dashboard  Users  All Users  Invite New
 If the person you want to invite already has an account, you can just put
their username
 If the person you want to invite does not have an account, you put their
email address in and they will receive an email with an invitation
2. Change role to FOLLOWER, AUTHOR, EDITOR, or ADMINISTRATOR
 Select which role you want based on what types of things the individual
will be doing on the blog.
- Changing author of a post
1. Dashboard Posts  Edit or Add New
 2. Select the author from the drop-down list under ‘author’ section

Calendars
- Calendar widget
1. Depending on which theme you have, or which version of wordpress you are
using, the calendar options will change.
2. In our Twenty Ten free wordpress design, the only calendar widget that we had
access to was one that showed when items were posted.
3. Depending on the options you have in wordpress, there is a way to create a
calendar that has more functions. It is my understanding that once you pay for
your blog domain (make your website xxxxx.com instead of a
xxxxxx.wordpress.com) you have more calendar options
- Adding a calendar
1. Because we couldn’t use a calendar through wordpress, we were able to insert a
calendar through google. You need to have a google calendar account in order to
use this.
2. Once you have created the calendar on google you need to copy the HTML code
for the calendar into your blog post
 My Calendars (on the left side of the page)  Settings (use the drop down
arrow on the right, next to my calendars)
 Select the calendar you want to upload (if you have multiple calendars
linked with your account)
 Make sure you have the tab with “Calendar Details” open
 Scroll down until you see “Embed this Calendar”
 Highlight and copy the code
3. To put the code into your blog
 Open the editing view of the page you want to put your calendar on
 Instead of using the “Visual” tab, select the “HTML” tab
 Past your code into the HTML box
 Update the page
 You will not be able to see the calendar if you switch back to the Visual
tab. However, it will show up as an interactive calendar on the blog page.

Categories
- Adding categories of posts
1. Dashboard Posts  Categories
2. Fill out Category information
3. Select “Add Category”
- When posting, make sure to select which categories your blog falls under on the right
side of the post page

Fonts
- Changing font type, size, and color on a “page”
1. What you can do depends on the template being used (This is for twenty-ten)
2. Along the top of the text area, select the “Show/Hide Kitchen Sink” button (it
should be the last one on the right)
 3. A second row of editing tools should appear that includes color, underlining, and
symbols.
4. The first item is “format” which will allow you to change size and style of text

Links
- Adding hyperlinks
1. Highlight the text you would like to hyperlink
2. Select hyperlink button (looks like three links attached)
3. Paste/write in the website link
4. Select “Add Link” to make the link
5. NOTE: it is generally a good idea when using hyperlinks to another website to
make sure the link opens in a new window or tab. To do that, you just have to
check the box that says “Open link in a new window/tab” when you create the
hyperlink.
- Adding links to other pages
1. Highlight the text you want to link
2. Select the hyperlink button (looks like three links attached)
3. Select “Or link to existing content”
4. From the list, select which page you want to link the text to
5. I used this to link researchers pages
- Add links to other websites on your homepage.
1. Depending on the template you are using, you may or may not have links set up.
2. Dashboard  Links  All links
 If there are already links there, you can edit a current link or add a new
one
 You can update the title of your link, and add a description on what the
link is
 Don’t forget to copy the link into the necessary field
 Under “Categories” make sure to select which category of links you want
your link to be shown under
3. To make sure the link is shown on your homepage, you have to include the
“Links” widget in the area you want.
 Under the widget settings, select which category of links it will show and
what you want displayed next to the link.
- Adding PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint documents, etc
1. Below the page title, and just above your text, there is an area that says
“Upload/Insert,” with images next to it.
2. To upload any sort of media (pdf, document, picture, video, etc) you want to
select the first image. The image looks like a music note and a camera, and when
you place your cursor over it, it says “Add Media.”
3. Once the “Add Media” page opens, you can select if you want to add something
from your computer, URL, gallery, or media library. Likely, you will be inserting
something from your computer.
4. Select the file you want to upload.
5. Once the file is loaded, make sure to fill out the appropriate information.
6. The “TITLE” section is the text that will hyperlink your document to the blog
 7. Select “Insert into Post” to finish the upload into your blog

Media Library
- On the dashboard, there is a tab titles “media library.” This will bring you to all of the
media you have on your blog (pictures, documents, etc).
- You can upload media directly to the library, without having it in a page or post.
- It is important to go into the library and delete images that you decided not to use after
uploading them. This will help save space.
- The file types allowed by wordpress are: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, pdf, doc, ppt, odt, pptx,
docx, pps, ppsx, xls, xlsx
- Maximum image sizes (width x height)
1. Thumbnail size (max): 150 x 150
2. Medium size (max) : 300 x 300
3. Large size (max) : 1024 x 1024

Pages
- Adding new pages
1. Dashboard  Pages  Add New
2. Under “Screen Options” you can select which boxes will be shown. Make sure
“Author” is selected. You can then change who the author of the material is.
3. Once information is written, select “Publish” button on the right to create the page
- Editing existing pages
1. Dashboard  Pages  All Pages  Edit
2. Once changes are made, select “Update” button on the right to save the changes
- Ordering the pages
1. Pages are generally ordered based on when you created them, but they can be
rearranged
2. Dashboard  Pages  All Pages
3. Select “Quick Edit” option below the page heading
4. Under “Order” select the number you want the page to be (1 being closest to
HOME). Select “Update” to save
5. Make sure all of the pages have an order number
- Page within a page
1. For blogger bios, I nested multiple pages under different categories. Under “Meet
our Bloggers” I created to groups “CCMA Researchers” and “CCMA Partners.”
Then, within each group, I nested each individual researcher and their bio
2. Dashboard  Pages  New Page
 Once the new page is created you can nest it under the appropriate page
 Page Attributes  Parent
• Select which parent page you want the page to be nested in

Photos
- Inserting photos
1. Adding pictures to your blog is similar to adding documents, with a few
additional details to keep in mind
 2. Before adding a photo to your post, you want to be sure that your cursor is where
you want the photo to be. Moving photos around after being inserted into a page
can mess up the text and the format of the page.
3. Select the “Add Media” button on the page (above your text box)
4. Once the “Add Media” page opens, you can select if you want to add something
from your computer, URL, gallery, or media library. Likely, you will be inserting
something from your computer.
5. Select the picture you want to upload.
6. Once the photo is loaded, make sure to fill out the appropriate information.
 Don’t forget to use a caption when necessary, which it almost always is
7. Under “Alignment,” select where you want your photo to be in the post.
8. You can also select what size you want your photo to be, depending on where it is
being placed on your blog.
9. Select “Insert into Post” to finish the upload into your blog
- Editing photos
1. Click on the photo you want to edit.
2. Two icons will appear on your photo. One will allow you to edit your photo (the
image with a landscape of a mountain), while the other will allow you to delete
your photo (the image with the red circle with a line through it).
3. Select the image with the mountain, and edit your photo. Be sure to click
“Update” when you are done.

Posts
- New posts
1. Dashboard  Posts  Add New
2. Upload your text and format the post
3. Select which categories the post falls into under “Categories”
4. Tag the post with “searchable terms” under the “Tags” area
5. Don’t forget to make sure the author is correct
6. Select “Publish” or “Save Draft”
- Editing posts
1. Dashboard  Posts  All Posts
2. If you move your cursor over the post title, you can select to either “Edit” or
“Quick Edit” the post. Select whichever one is appropriate for what you want to
do
 Quick Edit allows you to change the title, add/remove categories,
add/remove tags, change the time and date of the post, and change the
author
 Edit allows you to do changes on the text itself
3. Select “Update”
- Tags
1. Tagging your post is incredibly important. Tags are what help your post show up
when people search for a certain topic using a general search engine (like
Google).
2. When choosing tags for you post, it is important to think of what content your
post contains, and related topics that someone might search for.
 3. You want to make sure that you are tagging the most common/popular words in
the text. One fun way of figuring out what the main words in the post are is by
going to www.wordle.net. Copy and paste the text into the webpage and hit go.
The largest words are the words that are most commonly used in the document.
4. Another good idea in tagging is to make sure to include names (for those people
who Google themselves) and locations.
5. When you are working a post, you can add tags in the area that says “Tags”
located under the “Categories” section
6. To edit tags or see all of them
 Dashboard  Posts  Tags
 From that page you can add new tags and tag descriptions, and edit
existing tags

Settings
- The settings area on the dashboard is a useful area to familiarize yourself with. Under
settings you can change your blog title, tagline, date, time, privacy, etc.
- Depending on how you want your blog to run, you may change the standard settings
designated by wordpress.
- The “Discussion” area under the settings outlines policies for comments, so it is
important you read the options. Ours is designed in a way that no comment gets posted
unless it is approved by an administrator.

Statistics
- Wordpress has been designed to let you see who is visiting your blog and from what
domain. The statistics can tell you how many times a certain page is viewed, how they
found your blog (ie Google search), and if they clicked on any other links on your blog.
- General statistics
1. Dashboard  Site Stats
2. The stats page will give you a summary of what happened today and yesterday.
3. At the top of the page, you can see a bar graph that corresponds with the number
of visits on a particular day (you can also change to week or month)
4. If you click on one of the bars, it breaks down that particular day into
 Referrers: People clicked links from these pages to get to your site.
 Search Engine Terms: These are terms people used to find your site.
 Top Pages and Posts: These posts on your site got the most traffic.
 Clicks: Your visitors clicked these links on your site.
- Top Posts and Pages statistics
1. Once you have selected which day you want to look at the statistics for, you can
further break down each page/post’s statistics
2. Under the “Top Pages and Posts” section, you can see each of your pages and
posts listed. To the right of the title, you can see an icon that looks like a bar
graph. Select that icon.
3. The page you now see is the statistics for that particular page/post.
4. The statistics are broken down into a bar graph of total views of that page/post for
each day, the total number of views by month, average views per day in each
month, and the number of views in recent weeks (usually shows the month).
- Akismet statistics
1. The Akismet statistics area of your blog helps to monitor any spam comments that
you get.
2. This area is broken down into 4 parts
 Spam: unwanted commercial comments on the blog
 Ham: legitimate comments
 Missed spam: when spam is missed by Akismet
 False positive: when Akismet incorrectly identify a legitimate comment as
spam
3. You shouldn’t have to spend too much time looking at the Akismet statistics, but
it is a good thing to occasionally look through the information and make sure
there are no missed spams or false positives.