This is a sample of some content you can create pretty easily. As you can see in the picture below I am just typing this in a simple word editor that is included with WordPress. As Authors, all UKC employees have access to this editor and the ability to create original content. Anything you publish will automagically show up under the Article menu heading.

Pretty spooky - like having opposing mirrors that reflect into infinity!

So go ahead and log in when you have a spare moment – your first writing assignment is to compare any two products UKC carries side-by-side. Cover things like:

• Advantages
• Disadvantages
• Cost
• Life expectancy
• Care & cleaning

Include photos if you like – pictures can tell a story better than wordy descriptions – and the web is a visual medium, so take advantage of that. The important thing here is to share your knowledge with your customers – the articles you author may be the thing that convinces them to choose you over your competitor.

Hover over the icons to see what they do

You see all those fancy icons on the editor? Just like in Word or other text editors, you have tools for inserting pictures, videos, music (don’t do it!), documents such as pdf’s and spreadsheets (contractor applications maybe?).

On the second line there are more tools for changing font styles, colors, creating hyperlinks, quotes, lists… Don’t be afraid to play around with any of these, you can’t really break anything. Well, Kim could, so don’t let her see this.

So now you’ve written your first masterpiece, but you are a little bit scared to let the world see it, right? What if you misspelled something, or maybe your formatting is an assault on the eyes (go easy with that font-color button, amigo) – you don’t want to unleash that fresh hell on your potential customers do you? Relax – here comes some more cool features:

You suk at typing

Built-in spell checker puts a red squiggly under words that aren’t in it’s dictionary. These might include odd proper names or words that should be hyphenated, but for the most part it is accurate. Just right-click with your mouse button on the underlined word and select a replacement from the list of suggestions.

I should mention too that there are two editors: the Visual editor and the HTML editor. The Visual editor is commonly referred to as a WYSIWYG editor – you see the changes as you make them. To make a word bold you high-lite it and click the B button. You can also change the alignment of a picture by clicking on it and then clicking the left or right text alignment button. I discourage this last method as it is buggy and inserts conflicting html in the background. Best to delete the image and reinsert it with the proper alignment, or (scary!) switch to the HTML editor and change the alignment to one you want. the choices are align="alignnone", align="alignleft", align="aligncenter", align="alignright". If you are comfortable playing with html this is the fastest way to perfect your formatting.

The file uploader thingy

When you are ready to add an image, you have the choice of grabbing one off your hard drive (From Computer), from someone else’s really cool website (From URL), or off the UKC website (Gallery, Media Library, and NextGEN Gallery are all references to locations on the site). Just click on the first  button to the right of Upload/Insert and find your picture.

You have a few choices of how you want it inserted too. Have you noticed how the pictures in this story, as well as the galleries all open inside a cool framed box? That is some back-end hocus pocus I installed, but you can access it as well. Here’s how – when you have selected a picture (try getting one from your hard drive) and uploaded it, look at the selections at the bottom:

Did I say this was easy? Sorry.

The most important one, for the hocus pocus to work, is the File URL - make sure you select that (you only need to do it once, WordPress saves all your selections for the next pic), then choose an alignment (where you want the picture), the size (keep it smallish so it fits on the page), and now click  Insert Into Post.

Let’s take a look at how your blog post is shaping up – click on Preview to get an idea of how it will appear on the site. If you’ve made numerous changes to picture locations in the Visual Editor then there is a possibility that extra and unhelpful HTML has been inserted by the editor. If the images aren’t lining up the way you want them it may be best to delete them and re-insert them rather than learning html (unless you already know html, then feel free to click on the html tab and hack away).

Let me see it!

Assuming you like what you see, be brave, be bold, and click that Publish button! There you are – your first blog post. Assuming you didn’t break the Internet you can no click on View Post and admire your brilliance.

For more in-depth info on WordPress blogging, visit the WordPress website and poke around. It is the most well-documented framework ever made, and there are millions of users that love to offer advice. Sign up with WordPress Forums and join the conversation!