05 Nov How to get started blogging – Part 4 – Your first blog post

How to get started blogging with NEPA Geeks – Part 4 – Your first post!

Welcome to Part 4 of our series on blogging. So far, we’ve talked about what blogging is, how to buy a hosting account on NEPA Geeks to host your blog and how to set up your first blog using our easy hosting solution. Now, we’ll show you how to make your first blog post and a simple “About Me” page.

If you haven’t done so already, log into your WordPress blog. (In case you’ve forgotten, to log in, simply add /wp-admin/ to the end of your domain name. For example, yoursite.com/wp-admin/ Enter your username and password in the boxes on this page and you’re in!)

Click on the Posts link in the left-hand menu or hover your mouse pointer over the word Posts and click on “Add New.”

You’ll notice a box with the text “Enter title here” in grey text. This where you’ll put the title/headline of your first blog post. You can enter whatever you’d like, but a short “Hello, World!” or “Welcome to my blog” message will do for now.

Below the title box is a much larger box where you’ll enter the body of your blog post. At the top of the body box is a small icon you can use to upload images and other media (such as music or video files). We’ll focus on that later, but for now, the icons slightly below that are the text formatting buttons where you can make your text bold, italic, add strikethrough text, bullet lists and more. Feel free to play around with them just to get yourself acquainted with how they work, but they won’t do much until you have some text entered into the body box.

By now, you’re probably familiar with applications such as Word or OpenOffice and have a pretty good idea of how to enter and format text. Or maybe you’ve used GMail, Facebook or other social networking sites and have seen similar setups to the one you’re seeing here. If so, WordPress works much the same. Once you’ve got some text and a title you’re happy with, go ahead and hit the “Preview” button. This will let you see what the post will look like on your blog when it’s published. Don’t worry about how it looks if you’re not happy with it, yet. No one can see this post, it’s just a preview that is only available to you.

Ready to publish your first blog post? Go ahead and hit the blue “Publish” button to the right of the body box. Alternatively, you can save a draft to work on later or tell WordPress to publish the post at a later date, automatically. It’s up to you. Many people like publishing their posts as soon as possible while others like to write a few blog posts at once then set WordPress to automatically publish them throughout the week, freeing them up to work on other things.

Remember: you can always edit posts even after they’ve been published. You can also set them back to draft mode or remove them entirely by deleting them. Once deleted, though, they’re gone forever, so be careful!

Now, let’s create a Page.

Pages are useful for giving people quick access to important information about something. For example, an “About” page that talks about you, your blog, products or services you might offer, links to other blogs, or anything you want people to see. You can always reference or link back to a past blog post, but pages can have a tab or link at the top of your blog for a more prominent display, where they’re sure to be noticed by visitors to your blog.

To create a page, from the Dashboard of your blog, click on Pages (or hover the mouse pointer above the Pages link and click “Add New” in the menu that pops out.

Look familiar? No, you’re not experiencing deja vu… The way you build a new page in WordPress is exactly the same way you write a new blog post — even down to who can see it, when it gets published and how it looks. You can even edit and delete pages. It’s exactly the same! This is what makes WordPress so special; you can build an entire website right from the same interface, and it’s as easy as composing an email or creating a new document in Word.

From here on out, the sky is the limit. You have control over how the blog looks, what it’s used for and what you say on it. Welcome to the world of blogging. Have fun!