How to Create Pages in a WordPress Blog

The next step is to set up a few basic pages. These will be pages like About Me and Contact Me which every blog has to have and whatever other pages you want to make.

1.  Go to Pages/New Page in the dashboard menu.

2.  Write the name of the page in the title field and the content down below in the larger field.

3.  You will see that there are two tags above the large field called Visual and Text. You will work mainly in the Visual field. The Text field is for code.

4.  You have limited tools here for bolding, italics etc. but your theme and code will dictate the rest like the size and colour of the font.

5.  If you want to make some headings bigger you will have to use a minimum of code. But it’s super simple. Click over to the text side. Here you will see everything you have written plus a few strange bits and pieces – that’s code.

6.  All you have to do to make the writing bigger for headings is use one of the pieces of code below. Write your heading instead of the word Ingredients.

<h1 style=”text-align: center;”> Ingredients </h1>

<h2 style=”text-align: left;”>Ingredients</h2>

<h3 style=”text-align: left;”> Ingredients </h3>

The h1 is the biggest, with h3 the smallest. Try them.  But always enter them when you are in the text side and then click back to the Visual side to see what it looks like.

If you ever have any code to enter, it goes in the text side but don’t worry too much about it now. Those heading codes will get you by.

7.  If you want to add a photo:

a)  Click on Add Media and a new screen will appear, which says Insert Media.

b) Click on Upload Files and then Select Files and you will be able to find the photo on your computer.

c)  Double click on the photo and it will upload to the area which is called Media Library, which hosts all the images on your blog.

d)  Over on the right, there are a few things that you need to do. Fill in the Title, Caption if you want one, the Alt Text, which can be the same as the Title and a Description. Make sure you get in good keywords here because this will all help with getting the search engine to see you.

e)   Next to Alignment, choose Center for a full-width photo. If the photo is smaller, orient left or right so the writing comes up beside it and it isn’t left alone in a sea of white.

f)  In Link to, choose None.

g)  Under Size you have various sizes for your photo. You should have made the photo the exact width of your posting area so you will choose Full Size. It is best not to downsize photos in WordPress because they are still seen as large by the system and will slow it down.

h)  Click on Insert into Post and you will see it in the Visual side of the editor. If you look over to the Text side, you will see it depicted as code.

8.  Over on the right, you can see the word Publish. Under that are two buttons, Save Draft and Preview. The program saves automatically at intervals but you can manually do it too to make sure you don’t lose anything if something goes wrong.

9.  Under that box is Publish. That is for when you are satisfied everything is in order. Your page won’t be visible yet though. There is another step before it ends up on the navigation bar.

10.  Scroll down and you will find a section called WordPress SEO by Yoast. This is there because you have installed the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. You need to fill all this information in. Don’t worry about the Focus Keyword yet. I will write about all this in another article but meanwhile fill in the Meta Description. This is a short summary of your page. If you write more than 156 characters, the rest won’t be visible so try to keep within the limit. It will tell you when you have gone over. The SEO Title above populates automatically, but you can change it if you like.

11.  Once that is all filled in, you can push Publish. Now go to the article, How to Create a Menu in a WordPress Blog to see how to make the page visible.

How to create a Contact Me page

1. Enter the title and then place your cursor in the content field.

2. Click on Add Contact Form just above (this will only be there if you have activated Jetpack) and a popup will come up. What is there as a form is absolutely fine but you can change it if you want to. See Add a new field.

3. When you are happy with it, click at the bottom of the page, Add this form to my post.

4. Click Publish over on the right.

Top image courtesy of Janaka Dharmasena /FreeDigitalPhotos.net