At Pagemaster we want you be successful in your online marketing. We create websites and provide you training to see you succeed. This post is part of our series from our Site Training Workbook.
The Content Editor (available in the Editor screens) includes many more features than you may be aware of. Here we’ll walk through the Content Editor in some detail. It is helpful to know that hovering over each button will give you the basic function of that button.
Upload/Insert
This button lets you add media or files to your content. You’ll use this for adding images to a Page or Post, or adding a file like a PDF. We’ll get into its use in detail in another section.
The Editor Buttons – Left to Right, Row One
Basic Formatting Buttons
The first set of buttons are familiar to any user of a word processor. Options to Bold or Italicize or Strikethrough (cross out) text come first, followed by buttons to create an ordered (numbered) or unordered (bulleted) list, or stylize text as a blockquote (useful when quoting someone). Then come the buttons for justifying your text as left justified, centered or right justified.
Link Buttons
The buttons to create or disable links in your content come next. Selecting a piece of content in the Content Editor, then clicking the Link button, will make that selection into a link, which you can direct to any page or your website, or any website at all. We’ll get into creating links in more detail in another section.
Insert More Tag
The More Tag is a piece of code used by WordPress to break up lengthy content. For example, if you have a very lenghtly post, but only want to show the first paragraph on your blog listings page, you would insert this More Tag after the first paragraph. Users viewing your blog listings would see the first paragraph followed by a Read More link (or Continue Reading or similar). When they click that, they’d see the whole Post or Page.
Spell Check Button
Clicking this will run a spell check on your content. Always a good idea before publishing.
Full Screen Button
This button will take you to a distraction-free Full Screen mode, where a minimal amount of options are displayed on a white screen, allowing you to focus simply on the piece of content you are crafting. Once in Full Screen mode, you can easily return with the Exit Full Screen option.
Kitchen Sink Button
You should see two rows of buttons, a top, primary row and a bottom, secondary row. If you only see one row, clicking this Kitchen Sink button will reveal the second row of secondary buttons.
The Editor Buttons – Left to Right, Row Two
Styles Drop Down
This drop down list gives you access to pre-defined styles for your Sites theme. These are a better option than bolding and coloring text manually, as they help with site structure and consistency.
Underline Button
This button simply underlines selected text, or the next text you type after clicking it.
Full Justify Button
While you won’t usually Full Justify text, you could do that here.
Font Color Button
Font colors can be manually changed here. For site design and consistency, it’s not recommended that you manually change font colors.
Text Cleaning Buttons
The next couple of buttons are used for pasting content from Microsoft Word, other websites or elsewhere. Such text often brings invisible formatting with it. This formatting is helpful in the program it was created with, but can be frustrating in WordPress. To remove it, simply click the appropriate button here, paste your content into the window that appears and click
Insert.
There is a button here that looks like an eraser, and it can be used to select text already in your Content Editor, and then remove all formatting from it.
Special Characters
Characters like symbols (an ampersand or copyright symbol for example) can be accessed and inserted by clicking this button.
Indentation Buttons
These can be used to increase or decrease the indentation of a block of text.
Undo/Redo Buttons
These backward and forward arrows allow you to undo or redo recent changes to your content.
Help Button
The final button gives you pop-up help for the Content Editor. If we haven’t covered something in detail here, you should find it in this help section.
The Visual/HTML Tabs
In the upper right of the Content Editor you will see two tabs: Visual and HTML. Generally, you will want to leave this set to Visual. This gives you a user-friendly what-you-see-is-what-you-get content editor you’ll be familiar with. You do have the option to edit the HTML code of a Page or Post directly however. There are rare cases when this may be necessary, like embedding a YouTube video into your content for example. For such ‘embed codes’ that sites like YouTube provide to function, they have to be pasted in HTML mode, not in Visual mode.