In this tutorial we will teach you the very basic thing you need to do with WordPress – creating posts. The posts that are to be published can be found in our shared Google Drive.

1. To begin, login to your site admin panel and go to Posts -> Add New.

On this page you will see the WordPress posts editor. The most important parts of this page are:

• Post Title – enter the title of your post in this field. On your theme it will be shown above your content.
• Post Content – Note that it has two tabs – Visual (use the editor to format your text) and Text (add your HTML code directly).

• Justify Text – All normal text should be justified.

• Quotes – If you would like to add a quote, select the desired text and click the citations icon

2. Adding photos, videos and music to your posts is an easy task with WordPress. You need to add multimedia for two reasons: 1) the featured image 2) images for the post.

***After having found the image that you would like to use, all images on the website must be optimized and adapted for the web. The weight of the images is extremely important because if we upload images that are too heavy, the whole website slows down.

If you have Photoshop the “Save for web” option os the best bet. Another option is a program called Gimp, ask me for more details on this one.

1. Featured Image

The featured image will need to be uploaded in two formats, one for the Catholic-link page and another for Facebook.

Catholic-link page:

– It should be uploaded as a JPG file.

– The file size should be less than 30 KB

– The aspect ratio should be 8X5 (for example, in this example the dimension are 600X375).

Facebook page:

–  It should  be uploaded as a PNG

– The file should weigh around 200 KB

– The image should be 484 x 252

2. Images for the Post:

Seeing how the dimensions for the featured image and those for the FB post are different, you are going to need to use a program such as Photoshop or Gimp (a free downloadable program) to crop and modify the images.

For the CL featured image:

– Images need to be cropped according to an 8:5 ratio. They should be saved as a “.jpg” file and they should weigh less that 50 kb. In order to reach this weight, make sure that you the image using the “Save for web” option.

For the FB image:

– Images need to be cropped as a 484 x 252 image. They should be exported as a “.png” file and weight between 150-300 kb.

Click on the Add Media button in the top left part of the editor.

The WordPress Insert Media pop-up will appear. Click on the Select files button in the middle of the screen.

Once pick the local file, WordPress will upload it and refresh the page depending on the file format. For the purpose of this tutorial we will add an image to the post. For images there are two things you should take care of. First, describe the image itself – enter its Alt tag, title for the link and optionally a caption. The caption will appear under the actual image on your front end.

Once you do that, you need to specify the attachment settings of the image:

• Alignment – How to align the image in your content. It depends on your actual theme how alignments will work on your site.
• Link To – Select where to link the image to – the full size image file, the media page automatically created for each new attachment, custom URL or simply not to link it.
• Size – When you upload an image, WordPress creates multiple copies of it in different sizes. Choose whether you want a thumbnail, medium sized image or the entire image added to your post.

After you enter the information for you photo and choose how to visualize it in your post, click the Insert into post button. You will see the image added to your editor window.

You can now update your post and go to the front end of your site. You will see the newly added image added to your post.

Remember that Catholic-link serves as a library of resources for apostolate. The moment of categorization is thus very important and is what allows our users to easily locate the kind of resource that they are looking for. Try to be as specific as possible.

***Make sure you unclick “Uncategorized” and click “Publi” so that the Advertising is activated.

Tags are another way of organizing the many kind of posts. Simply choose a series of key words that are mentioned in the text and that will help those using search engines like Google to find the post.

*** Adding the tag “Z1” actives the post’s publicity. Please add this tag to every post!

5. Page Options

Please select the “Hide Featured Image” option underneath the “Featured Image Display” menu.

What you see below is the post’s description that Google will receive. The “Focus Keyword” can be the same as the tags but add only the most specific ones.

The SEO Title should be designed for searching, not so much for creativity. Imagine what people are going to be searching for: “Video about Self-Acceptance” or “Video Butterfly Circus” and try to adapt that title to that.

Finally add a short “Meta description” which will appear below the posts title in Google. Sometimes you can just grab the first paragraph of the posts. In any case, it should offer a brief summary of the content.

These items are what will appear on Facebook when someone inserts the link.

The title will almost always coincide with the title for the Catholic-Link page. If for some particular circumstance you would like to change the title for Facebook and/or Twitter, you can do so here.

***Earlier you added a specific image for Facebook. You will need now to click “Upload image” and select that image.

In order to set up the advertising for the post, you simply need to click the category “Publi”. Always revise the post, however, because the tag implements an automatic setup, meaning that an add will appear in the top right corner in after the 3 paragraph. If the post doesn’t look right, you may need to create another paragraph or take one away.

Once you enter the content of your first WordPress post, you need to Publish it. Before publishing, make sure that you preview that post and everything looks alright. Publishing brings your post to your actual website.

Once you are sure that:

– Post’s format looks good. ***If the post has any particular elements to it – a Playbuzz quiz for example – please review the post in Safari and Google Chrome. Open the post as well in your cellphone and in your Ipad to make sure that it appears correctly in all formats.

– The featured image on the home page is correctly cropped and has the right dimensions

– All of the videos, buttons, and links in the post function correctly. +

you can then post or program the post for social media.

Posting on FB:

– Before posting make sure that you copy the link, paste it into FB and assure that the post’s text and image appears correctly. If you have any problems use FB debugger page. On this page, you’ll find a simple box asking for a URL. Put in the URL of the page having the problem, and the tool will go and force retrieve the content of the page and display the parsed OpenGraph meta tags.

After clicking “debug,” scroll to the bottom of the page and verify what FB is recognizing with your link and make sure it is what you are you looking for.

In order to make things easier, we pay for service called Buffer: