This is an advanced technique for more experienced webmasters.
See Adding Custom CSS Through the WordPress Customize Utility
This is an advanced technique for more experienced webmasters.
See Adding Custom CSS Through the WordPress Customize Utility
Search engine optimization and social media integration are huge topics in their own right, but there are a many optional WordPress plugins that will help you achieve the basics.
The two I recommend are:
Note that Jetpack and Yoast SEO are both offered as free plugins, but with an upgrade path to paid enhancements. Particularly for a volunteer, nonprofit website, my advice is to see what you can do with the free versions before you even think about paying for extra bells and whistles.
You can add links to text within paragraphs, headlines, and captions. You can also add links to your images (as discussed in the section on images).
Good websites link to other good websites, making the web as a whole a richer place. Adding appropriate links can help your search engine optimization by showing the connection between your website and related websites with greater authority (like the connection between your club and Toastmasters International). Add links that will be helpful to readers. For example, a blog post on effective use of PowerPoint might link to other tutorials and resources such as books on the topic.
The trade off is that readers may click on links that lead away from your website. When marketers create “landing pages” to promote a specific offer, they typically place them on a page that includes few if any links that might take a visitor away from the form the marketer wants them to fill out. A blog post or event post for a club open house probably should minimize the use of links that might distract from your purpose of convincing a website visitor to become an in-person visitor.
On the other hand, one of the most powerful ways of building engagement with a website visitor is by presenting links to other relevant content on your own website.
At the same time, don’t be too greedy about keeping visitors on your website. If you make a strong enough impression, they will come back. You can also use the “Open in New Tab” technique explained below so that even as they follow the link, your website will remain open in the browser.
The Open in New Tab option is displayed and hidden using the up and down arrows at the end of the link entry / link editing control. Toggle this option on or off, depending on whether you want the link to open in a separate browser tab.
Once you have added a link, you can select the linked content and click on the pencil icon to edit it.
To remove a link, select the linked content and click on the broken chain (Unlink) icon.
Another way of adding a link is to select a word or phrase, and click CTRL-K (Windows) or Command-K (Mac). This has the same effect as clicking the chain link icon. This has the advantage of being a shortcut that WordPress has in common with Microsoft Word and other software.
As a rule, numbered lists make sense for procedures that should be performed in a specific order. Bullet lists are appropriate for presenting a list of points or options that are not inherently sequential.
Do one of the following:
When you are done adding bullet points, hit ENTER twice to go back to paragraph editing mode.
The procedure is similar to the one outlined above. To make it a numbered list, rather than a bullet list, do one of the following:
You can increase and decrease the indenting of individual list items to create more elaborate outlines of posts.
Long posts and pages should include headings, or subheadings, to organize your text and allow readers to scan and skip ahead to the parts they are most interested in.
Google and other search engines also analyze your headings and subheadings to understand the structured and emphasis of your content. Well organized content is likely to rank higher in search results and be displayed with more meaningful content previews.
Example: How to Add a Heading is an H3 subhead under the “Break Up Text with Headings” H2 heading.
Another special effect to consider is embedding social media content: public Facebook posts or Twitter tweets. This can be a way of quoting from famous social media feeds, or displaying a testimonial about your club that originally appeared on social media. Or it could be an image originally shared on Instagram.
The procedure is the essentially the same as for embedding a video:
See the full list of services for which WordPress supports embedded content at https://wordpress.org/support/article/embeds/
It is possible to upload video directly into WordPress, just as you would upload an image. You do that with the Video block.
However, I generally recommend uploading your video to YouTube or Facebook and then embed that service’s video player in your web page. Those services are better at handling the uploads of very large video files and optimizing them for display on the web.
You can do the same thing with several other video publishing services (for example, Vimeo), but I’ll offer details on these two examples.
Do one of the following:
A preview of the video should appear within the editor. You can add a caption just as you would for an image.
Do one of the following:
As of this writing, WordPress does not display a preview for Facebook videos within the editor — just a placeholder where the video will appear. However, when you publish or preview the post, it should appear on your public website.
Click below the Facebook URL placeholder displayed in the editor to add a caption for the video.
Make sure the content you embed is publicly accessible.
On YouTube, you can embed content that is designated Public or Unlisted (does not appear in YouTube search results) but not Private.
Any Facebook content you post should be shared as Public (not only visible to you and your friends).
A couple of additional options, for changing the image alignment, and adding a link, are displayed on a formatting button bar that appears when you hover your mouse over an image.
WordPress also offers built in Gallery and Slideshow blocks for adding multiple images.
In addition, you can embed images from services like Instagram and Flickr (see the section on embedding social media content, below).
The WordPress editor organizes content into blocks representing different content types. The default block is the paragraph. When you create a new post, enter the title, and hit ENTER, and start typing in the main content area of the editor, you are creating paragraph blocks.
To add other types of blocks, click the + button (appears both at the top of the page and in the margin when you add a blank line).
The block selector shows a selection of frequently used blocks. If you don’t see the content type you are looking for, you can enter a search term. For example, typing “image,” “photo,” or “picture” reveals the blocks for adding a single image or a gallery images, or other relevant content types.
Part of the point of the different blocks includes controls specific to that content format. The blocks for agenda roles and content used in the WordPress for Toastmasters agenda editor take advantage of this same concept. For example, the blocks for paragraph and heading include some of the same text controls (bold, italic, and link), but the heading block lets you choose the heading level. Similarly, an image block would let you size the image, format the image, and add a caption.
If you don’t see the sidebar, click on the gear icon in the upper right corner of the editing screen to reveal it. Note that there are actually two tabs to the sidebar, one for block properties and the other for document the properties of the document (like the categories of the promised land).
Some blocks, including paragraph and heading, include a transform button, which will be the first button on the formatting bar. Hover your mouse over it to see the options you can choose from. For example, if you typed in a paragraph but now want to display it as a heading or the first item in a list click the appropriate Transform To: choice.
Shortcut for adding blocks: If you know the name of the block type you want to add, enter the “/” character at the beginning of a line and start typing the name. After you’ve entered the first few letters, you should see an option to choose a block type. Click the one you want.
When working with text content, you can typically add a new block just by hitting enter at the end of a paragraph. However, when trying to squeeze content in between other types of blocks — for example, to add text between two images stacked one on top of another — you can use the additional + buttons that pop up when you hoover your mouse between any two blocks.
Another method that comes in handy is using the drop-down menu revealed by clicking the 3 buttons over a block. It includes “Insert Before,” “Insert After,” and “Remove Block” options.
That same button bar includes Move Up and Move Down buttons for moving any given block of content up or down.
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