Different types of content to use to build your site

 

Pages

Pages have a title and content similar to a Post, but they’re static (they’re not chronological), they can’t be categorized or tagged, and visitors typically can’t leave comments on them. Pages can also be hierarchical, whereas Posts can’t.

Pages can provide content that will always be accessible, instead of being time-sensitive as a post may be.

Posts

Posts are the articles you publish on your blog, like the ones you’d find in a magazine or newspaper. Posts are in chronological order, they can be categorized and tagged, and visitors are allowed to leave comments. They can also be set for “threaded” comments, (ie. comments on comments).

RSS Feeds

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”.  RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”,or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship.

RSS feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favorite websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.

Images

Images are added typically through: Dashboard>Media

When you are adding images to your website it’s important that the file size not be too large, or else your pages will take a long time to load for your visitors. When people surf the web they need pages to load as quickly as possible.
Depending on the number of  images you have on a page, your images should be between 20 and 100KB (the more images per page, the smaller each one should be.

To resize and compress your images using an image editor (like Photoshop or GIMP) it’s good to keep the following in mind:

For thumbnail images: make them no larger than 250 pixels in width or height.  “Save as” a  JPG/GIF/PNG format, at a maximum of 20KB per image.
For large images: a suggested maximum width of 800 pixels for a large image and a compression of under 100KB. Jpeg compression is best for these large files.

It’s not advisable to upload psd, bmp, or tiff files as these use minimal compression and will reflect poorly on your website’s download speed.

Widgets

Widgets are groupings of info on your blog which are located in the sidebar.

For example: a list of  post categories, a “tag cloud” (a free-form list in which the more popular tags have a larger font), a list of monthly archive links, a piece of text, etc.

To activate widgets, go to: Dashboard>Appearance>Widgets

Drag-and-drop the widget onto the sidebar boxes to arrange them as you wish. If there’s a button to the right of the widget’s name, click it to view and edit additional options for that widget.

Note: Not all themes will support widgets. If a widget doesn’t appear to be working, you may have to install a theme that supports them.

WYSIWYG Editor

WYSIWYG an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term refers to a user interface in which content (text and graphics) displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely resembling  its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, which may be a printed document, web page, or slide presentation.

Creating Screencasts and ScreenShots

Sometimes you may want to extract an image or video clip from a webpage, but there is no way to Right-Click> “Save Image as”. In these situations it’s handy to have a Screen Capture program. Click above to go to our page which links to the free Screen Capture program, ScreenPresso.

Press This

Press This is a built-in WordPress Tool which provides a lightning-fast way to grab text, images, or video from any website and post it to your blog without ever visiting WordPress.com. You can also use Press This to quickly share a link on your blog.

Use good judgement when you acquire content from other sites to avoid plagarism. When in doubt, Check out this website:

www.Plagarism.org FAQs

Embedded Audio

Embedding Audio Sounds into your web page is fairly simple.

PDF Documents

PDF (Portable Document Format) is an open standard for document exchange.

This file format, created by Adobe Systems in 1993, is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout flat document, including the text, fonts, graphics, and other information needed to display it.

Note: If you have PDF documents on your site, it’s always good to offer a link to the free Adobe Reader site.