Creating your blog post

Here’s a quick summary of what you need to do to post something new on your blog.

1. Log into your website
2. Select Add New Post
3. Copy and paste your headline
4. Copy and paste your main text
5. Upload your image
6. Publish your post

Let’s now go through each of these steps and a few more options in between.

Step 1 – Log in to your website

You log into your site by clicking Log in at the bottom of your home page.

You’ll see a screen like this

Here you enter the username and password GiteWise has sent you. You can change your password if you want to once you’ve logged in. Here’s how to do that.

The next screen you see is the WordPress Dashboard. It looks something like this:

The main things you’ll work with are Posts, Media and Pages. You can see the links to these in the menu on the left-hand side. This is the Dashboard menu.

Step 2 – Select Add new Post

To create a new post, you can do one of three things:

1 – Move your mouse over Posts in the Dashboard menu, then choose Add New from the submenu that opens up:

2 – Click Posts in the Dashboard menu, then either click Add New from the submenu that is now also in the Dashboard, or click Add New, to the right of the large Posts near the top of the page:

3 – Use the black navigation bar at the top of the page. Move your mouse cursor over the + New and you’ll see a dropdown menu for Post | Media | Link | Page | User. Choose Post:

Step 3 – Copy and paste your headline

You’ll now see the blank Add New Post screen

Type or copy and paste your title into the box where it says Enter title here

Step 4 – Copy and paste your main text

Copy the main text of your blog post from the document you wrote it in and paste it into the empty space below the toolbar.

You can choose to either keep the formatting of the text as it appears in the document you’re pasting from or you can paste it as plain text. Your choice will depend on how complex the formatting is and how you want to control the formatting on your web page.

Personally, I prefer to paste as plain text. This avoids any risk incorrect formatting and makes it easier for me to follow the site’s stylesheet for headings, bullet point lists and so on.

However, this means, if any text was bold or italicised in your original document, you’ll need to review how you want to add emphasis to that text in the web version.

You can read more about pasting your text from Microsoft Word here.

If you can’t see the Paste Text icon   you need to click the toggle toolbar icon.

After you’ve pasted in your text, you may need to tidy up your paragraph breaks – as they may have pasted as double breaks. You’ll also want to give everything quick check through to make sure any formatting is as you want it.

Save Draft!

Before you go any further, it’s a good idea to save your work. To do this, click the Save Draft button on the right.

After you’ve done this, you’ll see Post draft updated near the top of the screen. To see what your post looks like so far, click on Preview post

The preview will open in a new tab.

You can then click on that tab to see how the post looks when formatted in the style of your site.

Click back to the ‘editor’ screen to tweak your post.

With your draft safely saved, you’re ready to upload an image and publish your post.