Pages
Pages are the basic building blocks of your WordPress site. Unless your site’s overall focus is a blog*, most of your content will be contained on pages.
This displays what you see when you add a new page (labels are courtesy of Worship Times):
Page Title:
You can change this later, but the original page title gets incorporated into the page url (web address), so if this is a page for an annual event, like Vacation Bible School, you might consider naming it the more general name, ‘Vacation Bible School,’ rather than ‘Vacation Bible School 2017.’
Once you publish your page, the permalink url will appear under this title bar:
Content Box:
The content box has several parts. The editor or main box is where content is added. This includes text, pictures, forms, maps, etc. The tool bars above the editor or content box help you add content.
Main tool bar:
When you first log in to your WordPress site, and open a page (or post*) you will likely see only the top line of the main tool bar. You can make the second line visible by clicking on the Toolbar Toggle option.
You will notice most of the tools are similar to a basic word processing program. You do not have the option of choosing exact font size, but the drop-down menu in the upper left of the tool bar does allow you to choose whether your text is Paragraph, or one of the Heading sizes and styles built into your particular WordPress theme. This is both to streamline your choices, and to help you create a web site that is easy on the eye, without a mishmash of fonts and font sizes.
Another unique WordPress tool is the quotation option – where you can highlight a section of text within your page by selecting it and choosing the quotation option. This will set apart the selected text from the rest of your text, often with indentation and a separate font style.
You can add links within your pages by selecting the link text and choosing the little chain link icon, and entering the url into the address bar:
You can learn what each of the other tools in the tool bar are by scrolling over them with your cursor. We encourage you to explore the different headings and tools to discover what each of them can accomplish.
Preview, Publish and Update
The publishing box, located in the upper right corner of your page editor has helpful tools for you to know about, and one very important function that you will use on every page you create:
Regarding the appearance of your page, you can preview your newly created page (this will open a new window – to continue to edit, go back to the original tab or window), or any future edits before you publish your page, using the ‘Preview’ option, which will open a new tab or window with a page preview. You can then simply close that window or tab when you are done with the preview, and continue working in the editing section of your original window or tab.
When you are ready to publish, you will need to click on the ‘Publish’ button (the text will change to ‘Update’ once you have published the page) to make it live on your website.
Note: Simply publishing your page will not automatically add it to your site’s menu. If you want the page to appear on your site’s menu, you will need to go to your menu options under ‘Appearance’ in the main WordPress Dashboard.
There are a few other tools within the publishing box that are not used as often, such as Visibility – whether your page is public, private (only people who can log in to your website can see it), or password-protected, publishing schedule (can set it to publish in the future), and some other information about the page status and search engine optimization (SEO).
Now you have the tools to publish a basic page. Tomorrow we’ll cover more important tools offered in WordPress Pages to create a unique and welcoming website.
*Most blogs on WordPress-based sites utilize ‘Posts’ rather than ‘Pages.’ Look for future information on Posts, why you use them to build a blog, and other uses for Posts.
