This post will cover the basics of how to create a post on ePortfolios for your artist/musician/photographer report and your film review. As a sample, I’ll demo how to make a post about Lou Reed, an influential New York rock musician whose career began in the 1960s with the Velvet Underground.

Jump ahead to:

The Dashboard, Starting a New Post, Adding a YouTube Video, Adding an Image, Making a Link, Finishing Up

The Dashboard

When you go to the main page, navigate to the Dashboard by hovering over the name of the site (The Arts in NYC) and selecting “Dashboard.”

Now you’re in the Dashboard, which is the “back end” of the site where you can generate the content that will show up on the website. Add a new post by going to “Posts” and selecting “Add New” on the left hand side. Alternatively, you can hover over “+ New” from the top and select “Post.”

Starting a New Post

Now you’re in the post editor. The first thing to do, always, is to select a category by scrolling down and finding the “Categories” box on the right. This will determine how posts will be sorted on the site, and unless you put your post in a category, we won’t be able to view it!

Be sure you’ve selected the correct category! You can also add tags if you like, which will help other people find your site in searches. These are more specific and can refer to anything from genres, to ideas you want to focus on in your post, to course themes.

Lastly, select your featured image. When searching for images, you need to use the Creative Commons to find images that are licensed for non-commercial, public use. Find an image, download it to your computer, and then select “Set Featured Image.” This will open the Media window. Click “Upload Files” and then either drag and drop the image or search for it on your computer.

Almost every page in WordPress Dashboard has a green button that finalizes whatever step you’re doing. Make sure you click it to actually complete the task!

Finally, give your post a title.

Now that you’ve done a few things, it’s a good idea to save your post as a draft.

Always save your post because WordPress doesn’t always autosave. Back to top

Post Content

Now that you’ve set up your post, it’s time to start typing. It’s best to type directly into your post, and save often. If you do write in a word processor first, you may end up inadvertently copying and pasting formatting that doesn’t display nicely in WordPress.

Adding a YouTube video

You can add a YouTube video into any post by simply copying and pasting the URL of the video directly into WordPress. Find your video and then click the “Share” button

Copy that URL and then paste it directly into your editor. If I paste this:

https://youtu.be/iLQzaLr1enE

your post will display like this:

Back to top

Adding an image

To add an image, select “Add Media” from above the text editor.

Once here, you can either use a previously uploaded image in the Media Library, or Upload a new image. Upload just as you did with the featured image, but this time, look at the boxes on the right.

If you want to give your image a caption, it will display underneath the photo. Under “Attachment Display Settings,” make sure “Media File” is selected. You can decide what size you want your image, too. Large means the image will span the width of the post (sometimes “Full Size” is the biggest size, which will span the width of the post). Medium is what you use if you want to wrap text around your image. To do this, select either “Left” or “Right” for “Alignment” and the image will go to either the right or left of the text. Avoid Small (it’s too small) or Full Size (can be too big, depending on the size of the original image).

Here, the image went after the paragraph rather than wrapped. To fix this, manually drag the image to the place in the text where you want the to start wrapping. It’s best to do this at the beginning of a paragraph.

If you want to change any aspect of the image, including its size or its position on the page, click the image and then click the “Edit” button which looks like a pencil. Back to top

Sometimes you might want to link to another webpage. To do this, select the text you would like to link and click on the “link” button. Let’s say I want to link to a page of information about Andy Warhol.

Paste the link, and then click the gear button.

Here click “Open link in a new tab” so that your reader doesn’t lose the page with your post. Back to top

Final Steps

Remember to save throughout the process to make sure you don’t lose any work. WordPress has a word count so you can see how close you are to your desired length.

One of the most important things you can do is to preview your post. To do this, select “Preview” from the upper right of the post editor window.

This will open your post in a new window and you can see exactly what it will look like once published. This is a crucial step, because you may realize that something doesn’t display correctly, or your spacing is weird, or you want to change the position or size of an image. Test your links, too. If you need to make changes, go back in and edit.

You can change when you want to publish the post. Perhaps you were working on it at 3am and you don’t want people to see that! Click “edit” next to “Publish: immediately” to schedule a post.

Make sure you selected the right category!!

Lastly, once you’re sure everything is right and you’ve previewed the page and the category is correct, click the green Publish button. You can still go back and edit if you need to, just make sure you click the “Update” button to keep any changes. Back to top