Web Design in Asheville NC by Blue Dozen Design, LLC

Well, we’ve covered the general stuff – your WordPress Dashboard and some of it’s function, plus the basics of Posts and Pages.

You’re in there, elbow-deep, editing a page or post. Maybe you’re just starting a page or post – but you want to add some zip to your content.

“Tell me, James – how do I do that?” you’re probably saying…

Well – your Visual Editor is what you’re going to use to do stuff like make your text bold, change colors, add links, align stuff and make nifty lists and quotes.

Using your Visual Editor in posts, pages and in other special areas (if we designed the site, you might have other places that the Visual Editor will show up,) is really the same pretty much everywhere. Learn it – get used to the nomenclature, and you can really take your posts or pages to a higher level. Make the text interesting, make it easier to read, easier to navigate and – ultimately – easier for your customer/client/visitor to get to exactly what they’re looking for. Plus – you can use it to help direct folks to your “Call to Action” page or link or store or what-have-you. The Visual Editor makes it simple.

Your WordPress Visual Editor includes the following functionality:

Add Media – Images, videos, music and files. We’ll discuss this more in another post.
Font Style – Bold, italics, ~~strikethrough~~, underline. ~~Groovy!~~
Lists – Make an unordered or numbered list. Like this one!
Quotes – make text really stand out.
Justify – Left, center, right and full-width justification. Align that text, yo!
Links – Make or break a link to any web URL (a URL is like http://designavl.com)
Page Break – make a “More” button that reveals more content – but only after the user clicks on “More.”
Spell Check – Good spelling is cruucial.
Full Screen – Use the editor in full screen mode.
Kitchen Sink – Hide or show the second line of icons.
Text Style – Change fonts (this function depends on how we set your site up. If you want to know what each one does, though – feel free to experiment. You can always erase or change it…)
Text Color – Changes text color. This one is, we hope, pretty obvious.
Paste Tools – Use these when pasting from Word or any other text editor. Otherwise, you can wind up with some funky text formatting that gets left over from copy/paste.
Erase – This erases formatting – not the text itself. If something is weird-looking, use this. It can be an easy way to correct formatting issues.
Indent – Indent your text. Or, if it’s in a list (see above,) it will push the text to the next “level” of indentation.
Undo – Undoes stuff. I really want one of these in my brain and on my mouth, but that’s another story for another time.
Help – Get help. If you REALLY need help, contact us. We’d be happy to lend a hand.

So, there’s a whole, whole lot you can do with your WordPress visual editor. Always remember – you can experiment all you want. WordPress sites are very open-ended, and if you make a mistake, it’s easy to drop back to an older version, or even start over with a “blank” page. Experiment, play and make your site YOURS.

We’re about 2 weeks away from the launch of our fabulous WordPress help, tutorial and resources section. Stay tuned!