WordPress Writing Tutorial

In this article we’re going to explain the WordPress editor that you’ll be using on our site to create content.  It is fairly straight forward for anyone that has used a CMS in the past.

Let’s get Started

Before we get started with some of the basics you’ll want to do some things first to make sure that you can see all of the tools available to you.  In the top right hand corner of the editor screen you will see a drop down menu that is labeled “Screen Options”.  Click that and a menu will open.  Make sure that you have the option for “Custom Fields” checked.

screen-options

We are going to break this post down into two parts.  The first is the actual writing and formatting of a post.  This will include things like adding a title, body text, images, headings, font-types, and other important things for different article types on our site.  The second is going to be the finishing touches for an article.  This includes things like categories, tags, previewing, custom fields, seo, and others.

Post Format

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When you open the editor you will notice that the first things you will see are two blank areas where you can add text.  The top bar is for your title and the bottom text editor area is for your post’s content.  These are both fairly straight forward, you will add your post’s title into the top bar and then begin writing your article in the editor below.

There are multiple ways to interact with the text-editor and numerous tools at the top of the editor space.  On the top right of the editor you will see that you can switch between a “Visual Editor” and a “Text Editor”.  The visual editor is what you’ll likely be focusing on starting out.  The text editor does allow you to add custom HTML to your posts, but you shouldn’t need that unless adding something like a table.

Titles

Titles are pretty self explanatory.  You’ll want to deliver an attention grabbing title that will entice readers to click on your article, without being click-baity or non-factual.  We do try to adhere to capitalization rules in our titles as well.  Below you will find a brief run-down of what you should be capitalizing in your article titles.

Capitalize These

Nouns, Adjectives, Verbs, Adverbs, Pronouns, Subordinating Conjunctions.

Don’t Capitalize

Articles – a, an, the

Coordinating Conjunctions – and, but, or, for, nor

Prepositions – on, at, to, from, by

It’s important to note that regardless of these rules, you will capitalize the first and last words of a title regardless of the word.  

The Article Body

Moving on the actual body of your article, there are many different things you are going to use here.  You’ve got your text itself, headings, text-styles, block quotes, lists, links, and media.  We’re going to go through these one by one so that you know what to use and where.

1) Text

bold-text

The text of your article is essentially the meat and potatoes of your article.  You’re going to want to try and write clean, grammatically correct articles in general, but they also need to be formatted correctly.  We do not have a style guide when it comes to things like spacing after periods or oxford commas, but we do ask that you do a few things in each of your articles.

The first is using text-styles in the beginning of your posts.

Within the first sentence of your post we ask that you use bold text on the subject of the article.  If the article is about the Xbox One X, we ask that you bold that word in the first sentence.  Xbox One X. Simply highlight the text you want to bold and then press the B button at the top of the screen.  Next, you’ll want to italicize a secondary topic in your first sentence.  For example, say you are talking about Microsoft as a company as well.

ex.  Today the Xbox One X was given a price cut, according to Microsoft.

In this example we bolded the Xbox One X and italicized Microsoft.  You could also italicize “price cut” potentially if that was the main point of emphasis for your article.  If you would like to read more about these tags you can head to this page.

2) Headings and Block Quotes

heading-3

Writing for the web, you should know what headings are.  They are a hierarchical group of tags that essentially outline a page’s content.  I’m not going to explain the important of headings and what they are, but you will be using them.  In the drop down menu next to the bold button at the top you will find your different headings.

The only headings you will be using are the heading 3 option.  To do this, simply open the drop down and select Heading 3.  You can either highlight text like the example above, or you can select H3 and then write the text, either way will suffice.

As you can see, selecting the Heading 3 option will change the text style

Heading 3

Your page should be structured logically with headings.  Your title will automatically be added as the H1 heading.  There will be a field added to your post (explained below) that will be your H2 heading.  Any other heading that you add after should be H3.  This text should be something that is a title that is explaining what the content on the page is saying.

* An H3 title is not necessary in your writing, but it can help break out important sections of an article like a video title, image title, or adding other importance to specific parts of your article.

We’re actually going to skip over a section that I wanted to talk about in Block Quotes, and we’ll explain that later.  For now, don’t worry about blocking out or highlighting text using the block quotes button on the screen editor.

Lists

If there is something that you want to make a list of, you can do that by using the unordered or ordered list functionality in the editor.  Below we’ll show two examples of a list.

Unordered List

  •  List Item
  • List Item
  • List Item
  • List Item

The list buttons are side by side on the editor.  You can either highlight text and break it into a list or click the button and then begin editing.  The icon with a bulleted list is the unordered list button and the one next to it will produce an ordered list.

Top PlayStation Exclusives

  1. God of War
  2. Spider-Man
  3. Bloodborne
  4. PlayStation All-Stars
  5. The Last of Us 2

This was just an example, please calm down.

Creating Links

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It’s important to provide links when necessary.  You’ll want to make sure that links work before you add them in the editor.  Like other things in the text editor, adding a link is as simple as highlighting text and clicking the link icon at the top of the screen.  This will open a new window that allows you to paste or type a link, OR, you can search our site for related articles that you might want to link back to.

ex.  Modern Warfare is set to arrive on this date, check out our preview for the game in the meantime.

ADDING MEDIA TO YOUR POSTS

Images, Tweets, and other embeddable objects.

For the most part, we deal in two types of media that we add to our pages.  The first are images.

You will add a single 1280x720px image to the top of each of your posts.  The second is YouTube videos.  Those are the two things we are going to cover here.  There are many other embeddable media types that will work on our site, but we ask that you clear it with an editor before adding anything other than images from OUR Media Library or YouTube videos using the method described below.

Images

Images are going to be an important part of your articles.  While news articles will generally have one image in them, longer articles, reviews, or guides may have far more.  We’re going to go through what we expect from you when uploading images to your posts.

The first thing is that you will need to add images to your posts that are at least 1280 x 720 px.  If you aren’t sure about images sizes, you will need to familiarize yourself with this before you start writing for us.  Uploading the wrong image sizes or wrong dimensions is not acceptable.  This article is a primer for aspect ratios.  You will always be looking for 16:9 images that are greater than or equal to 1280 x 720 px.

The good thing is that this is a very common aspect ratio.  Whether you are using our media library or uploading an image you’ve captured or found elsewhere, you will need to double check to make sure it’s the right size.

Using our images

You can add an existing image from our catalog by clicking the Add Media button at the top of the screen.  This will open a browsable window that has every image that we’ve ever uploaded.  Simply select the one you want, select your size, and alignment and it will be added wherever on the page that your cursor is.

image-upload

Uploading your own images

There are often times where an article will call for using an image that we don’t have in our library.  If this is the case, you’re going to want to make sure you aren’t using an image that may be copyrighted.  In general, things like screenshots or other publisher made content are free to use on our site.  If something has a watermark on it, or looks like it was created explicitly for use on another website (like our own), please refrain from using it.  There are millions of images to choose from, the best policy when in doubt of whether an image may be copyrighted is to just not use it.

images

When uploading an image, you will be given the option to select the alignment and image size as well.  What you’ll want to select is Full Size and Align None.  Once you set this the first time, it will always stay like that until you change it.  Once you’ve changed this there are a couple of final things that you need to remember about images.

First, if you get an image from somewhere else, you need to change the title of the image.  This can be done by right clicking on it on your desktop and the selecting rename.  Renaming format is with dashes between words.

Lastly, you’ll want to add alt text to your image which describes what it is.  This does not need dashes between words.  It can simply be a description of what the image is and what’s in the image.

Embedding YouTube Videos

The proper way to embed a YouTube video on our site is by getting the shortlink to the video.  You can do this by snagging it from YouTube or from a YouTube embed.  We’ll go over both methods.

On YouTube, you simply need to click on the share option below the video to the right, this will open up a window that will allow you to copy the link to the video.  Copy that link and then paste it into the editor and it should immediately show-up if it is a public video.

The second method you can use to get an embed link is to click the share button on an embedded youtube video, like the one above.  Click the share link on the top right and the link will show up, copy that link and paste it into the editor and the video should show up.

The Basics are Completed

Those are the basics and the minimum requirements that we expect you to have a full understanding of when posting on our site.  We don’t expect you to grasp it all immediately and we’re here to help you if you need help with any aspect of the post creation process, but hopefully this sets you on the right track.

So now for the Finishing Touches

Now that your post is nearly completed, there are just some finishing touches to attend to.  This includes the categorization of your post, the tags, featured image, seo section, and custom fields.

Categories

On the right hand side of the editor you will see a section for categories.  Your rule of thumb will be that you will only categorize a post with one category and it will be one of these four.

  • Game News
  • Game Guides
  • Game Reviews
  • Original Articles

Your category will only ever be one of these four unless told otherwise.

Tags

Below the categories section you will see another section for tags.  Tags can be somewhat tricky and the way that they work on our site is nuanced and too lengthy to explain in this tutorial.  Hopefully, we’ll get you to understand them as time goes on, but to start, you will only want to tag posts with a few different things.

  • Game Name – Always
  • Developer – Optional
  • Publisher – Optional
  • Platforms – Always on Exclusive Games

Featured Image

The featured image will automatically be added to your post on publication.  If your article has images in it that have been either used from our library or uploaded to our library the first image in the post will be used as the featured image.  This featured image will be the image that you see in archive and home pages to represent your content.

SEO BOX

It’s important to note a couple of things about the SEO box below your post.  This is not a magic bullet for great traffic or rankings, but more of a guideline to make good content.  There are practical and functional aspect of this box and we’ll explain both.

The first thing you’ll see is the Focus Keyphrase box.  If you’re just getting started with written content creation, you may not have thought about seo.  But this is basically making you think about what are your keyphrases in a post.  Is it a game title?  Is it a word, string of words, question, or other.  Basically, it doesn’t matter if you put in a focus keyphrase, but this tool will show you if your actual keyphrase is being represented by the words in your post.  Are you using the keyphrase too much?  Are you using it too little?  This will show you more details about your posts from an seo perspective.  You can use the SEO analysis tools in this section to get more details about your post.

Editing Snippet

Below the Focus Keyphrase you will see your Snippet Preview.  This is basically a preview of what you’re submitting to search engines as the description of the page.  By default this will be an excerpt of the content, the first couple of sentences in most cases.  You can edit the snippet here, if you think that you have a better eye catching description that the first words of your article.  Opening your article strong and you shouldn’t need to do this.  But it is an option.  Just make sure that you use all of the available characters when crafting a custom snippet.

Adding your Custom Fields

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On each post you will need to make two custom fields.  One will be for your article tracking, the other will be to add a secondary heading below your title.

Each custom field is made up of two parts —  The Name and the Value.

To add your author tracking you need to put your first name (lowercase) in the name field, and then put a number 1 in the value field.  Once both are entered hit “Add Custom Field” and it will be added to your post.

custom-fields

The second custom field will be “h2” in the name field and then whatever your h2 text will be.  In this example we put “A secondary heading that gives a little more color to your post.”

And that’s that…. now it’s time to check your work.

Saving Drafts and Previewing your Work

Our site has an autosave functionality that will save your content in real time.  Working on something that needs to be put off for later.  It should be auto-saved in most situations.  If you need to manually save a draft, you can click the Save Draft button at the top right of the screen in the Publishing Tools.

More importantly, before you send off your work for an editor to look at, it’s important that you are able to proofread your own content as well.  This can be done either in the editor in on the page itself.  You can preview what your content will look like by hitting the preview button at the top right of the screen.  Here you can check for image formatting, links, video embeds, spelling errors, or anything else that isn’t correct.

While we’ll be looking at your work when you start out, once you are publishing on your own it’s important to check your work before hitting the Publish/Submit button.  Which is what you’ll do once your post is ready to go live.

Click the blue button at the bottom of the publish module and it will initially send your work for an editor to approve before publication.  Our goal is to get you publishing on your own, but that is going to depend on how quickly you learn the stuff in this post and how error free and accurate your content is when you submit it to an editor.  Just because you have someone checking your work, make sure it’s as clean as possible so that we can get an accurate picture of whether we’ll be able to trust you to publish on your own.

As always, if you have any questions about any of this, please contact me on Discord.

Now that you have the basics out of the way, it’s on to the good stuff.

Writing tutorials.

How to Write Better Titles and Increase Your Bottom Line

Using Keywords in Your Posts

Choosing the Right Content to Write