WordPress: The Missing Manual

Chapter 6. Jazzing Up Your Posts

You know what an ordinary WordPress post looks like—it starts with a title, followed by one or more paragraphs of text. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Providing you pick the right theme, your WordPress site can look surprisingly hip, even if it holds nothing more than plain text.

However, there are plenty of types of sites that need more from a post. For example, if you’re posting news articles, you certainly want to add pictures. And if you’re writing long posts (on anything from business analytics to relationship advice), you’ll make the reading experience much better if you use subheadings to structure your thoughts. To add details like these, along with lists, links, and the other accoutrements of a web page, you need to take charge of WordPress’s post editor, which you’ll do in this chapter.

Fancy posts aren’t just about formatting—they’re also about features. For example, you can use specialized tags to show just a portion of a post on your home page (rather than the whole thing), giving you a ridiculously useful way to promote many posts in a small space. Or, you can use images from your posts to create a slide-show that, say, promotes your top posts on the home page. (WordPress calls these presentations sliders.)

In this chapter, you’ll use all these techniques to expand the possibilities for your site.

Making Fancier Posts

You’ve seen plenty of WordPress posts so far, but none are likely to impress your web designer friends. Fortunately, ...