Adding and Editing WordPress Pages

Adding a New Page

You add a new page in WordPress by clicking Pages / New link in the left Menu of the WordPress admin area.  You are presented page with various boxes and an empty text editor to fill out.  You have to work on a number of important entries on this page.

1. Type an effective title for your page into the box under the words ‘Add New Page’.
2. Compose the body of your page in the large text editor beneath that box.
3. Choose if this page has a parent in the Attributes / Parent drop down.
4. Decide if you want to allow comments, trackbacks and pings on this page.  Most pages have these disallowed.  They are down at the bottom of the editor screen.
5. Complete the Title tag, Meta Description and Meta Keywords for the search engines.

The editor pane works in a similar way to the one you will have used in your email client.  It can be a bit fiddly sometimes, but one of the most important things to note is that if you are pasting text from another source, always paste the text into a text editor first and then copy from that.  This will remove any spurious hidden layout data that will cause you no end of pain.  Always control the formatting of your text within WordPress after you have brought it in via a text editor. Notepad in PC and TextEdit on the Mac are perfect choices.

Once you are happy with your settings and content, you can either publish directly by clicking the big blue Publish button on the right near the top of your browser window or Save Draft and preview before you publish.

Editing an Existing Page

To edit an existing page you go via the page listing screen which you access via Pages / Edit in the left menu of the WordPress Admin area.

On pressing this link you will be presented with a list of all of the pages (including your draft pages).  Locate the one you want and click on the page title to edit it.  This will looad the page into the page editor and you will be able to make any changes to the settings we discussed above.

After You’ve Mastered The Basics

Once you know how to add and edit a page, you can start to use some of the slightly more advanced techniques.  These include

• Using the quicklink button at the top right of the WordPress Admin area. This will allow you to Add and Edit pages as well.
• You can edit the Permalink url structure of your page to make it more obvious and possibly shorter for your users.
• You can use different page templates to control how the page displays on your website (e.g. with no sidebars).
• You can override the sort order pages appear by using the Attribuyes / Order field and entering an number to control the order the pages will appear in lists.