Dress your blog for success!

Installing a new theme is easy with WordPress! Our FAQ and Help pages tell you how. All of our themes are widget-ready with a variety of configurations to choose from.

FYI

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Adding the Tag Cloud widget

In your dashboard, choose Appearance, Widgets, to go to your widgets page.
Drag and drop the Tag Cloud widget into the sidebar of your choice. If your sidebars are closed, use the triangles at the top right to open them. As you add tags to your blog posts, your tag cloud will grow.

Tags used more frequently will appear in a larger font, so your readers will see what your most popular topics are.

Using Post Tags

When you add a post to your WordPress blog, it is always wise to add the appropriate tags. Use keywords from your post that represent the subject matter.

Ask yourself, “What words would cause a search engine like Google or Yahoo to place my post in the top of its results list?” These are the words that you should use for your tags.Try to make your tags as unique as possible and don’t overdo it. You should never need more than five or six tags.

Using tags wisely will help your blog to get noticed, as they are an important part of Search Engine Optimization, SEO, for your blog.

You can also use Tag Clouds to help your readers find what they are looking for.

Using the Tag Cloud

In addition to being helpful for Search Engine Optimization, tags can help your readers find what they are looking for on your blog. Using a Tag Cloud, like the one on these pages, enables users to find all posts related to a certain topic by clicking on the keyword in your Tag Cloud.

Try it now! Click on one of the words in the Tag Cloud at the bottom of this page to view related posts. The Tag Cloud displays your most popular keywords in a larger font, so your readers can see at a glance what you have been writing about the most. Your Tag Cloud is like a graphical table of contents for your blog.

Adding a new post to your blog

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WordPress is very intuitive. It is easy to add a new post to your blog. From your Dashboard, the default page of your administration pages, you can simply use the QuickPress box and start typing.

For more options, however, you will want to click on New Post, at the top of the Dashboard, or Posts/Add New in your left menu bar. Then you will see the full-featured post editor that will make your blog sing and dance.

The Visual Editor functions in much the same way as your word processor. Continue reading

Adding a picture to your post

Insert picture

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To add a picture to your post, click on the Insert Picture icon at the top of the Post Editor. This will open a dialogue box that will enable you to download a picture file from your computer. Continue reading

Sticky Posts

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Sometimes you want some information to always stay visible on your blog’s front page. One way to do this is to create a sticky post. Sticky posts remain as the first post visible on your page. You  can even have more than one sticky post if you wish.

Creating a sticky post

To make a sticky post, make sure that your post is open in the editor. You can open your post in the editor by clicking on the edit link on your blog page, or by choosing Posts/Edit, and your post’s name in the Dashboard.

Go to the Publish box at the right of the page. Where it says Visibility, click Edit. This reveals a checkbox where you can choose to make your post sticky.

When you Continue reading

Interrupting your posts

If you would like to show only part of your posts on the front page of your blog, you can use the more tag in the HTML Editor to interrupt your posts and allow your reader to see the post in its entirety on its own page.

This gives your reader more choices, as more posts will be visible on your front page without having to scroll excessively.

Using the more tag

To insert the more tag, first open your post in the editor. Switch to HTML Editor using the tab at the top right of the editing box. Click to place your cursor where you would like to interrupt your text. Click more in the HTML Editor.

You can return to the Visual Editor to resume work on your post, if you’d like. Click Publish  or Update to save your changes and you are done.