WordPress basics
More than one third of all websites use WordPress as content management system (CMS). Famous brands such as TechCrunch, The New Yorker, and The New York Times use WordPress. The CMS is also very popular with bloggers. It is open source, easy to use and learn, and countless templates are available.
Starting your own blog with WordPress is a matter of minutes. You can use a variety of tutorial videos that lead you step-by-step through the process. In this training you explore WordPress by publishing your post on academicblogging.nl. This blog was created for this training and is only accessible with a login. It serves as a safe learning environment in which you can play around an mess things up.
Log in to the backend
Go to academicblogging.nl/wp-admin and log in with your username and password. You will enter the backend of the website. What you see is the dashboard (the light coloured field), a dark vertical bar on the left and a dark horizontal bar on top of the dashboard.

Create a new blog post
You can start a new post by moving your cursor to the Posts button on the left, a drop down menu will appear. If you click on All Posts, you will go to the overview of all posts. Click on Add New to start a new post.

Edit post screen
After clicking on the Add New post, you will arrive at the space in which you can edit your post. If you click in the block with Add title, you can type your title. The blue button on the top right is the Publish button. If you want to check the result of what you did before you publish, you can click on the Preview button left of the Publish button. You will go to a preview page that is only visible to you.

Placing and editing text
Now it is time to add the rest of the text. If you move your mouse below the title block (left of the + sign) and click, a flashing text cursur appears. You can simply copy (ctrl c) your the text from your Word file and paste (ctrl v) it. The text will be placed, including letter formats and links. If you click in the text, you will see a bar appear on top of the text frame. In this bar you find the basic text editing options: bold, italic, hyperlink, allignment, etc.

The Block Editor
As you will see, when you move your mouse over the text, every paragraph has it’s own ‘block’. Blocks play a central role in the WordPress Block Editor. You can see blocks as tiles on the shower wall. Each tile has it’s own type of content (paragraph, title, movie, etc.). By placing, removing, changing and moving the tiles, you change the looks of the wall.
If you click on a paragraph, you see the block (picture above). By clicking on the arrows (or click and drag) in the small bar on the right side you can replace the block. When you click on the + sign attached to the bottom of block, you will see the dialoge box below. With this you can create a block. By clicking on one of the options, you create for instance a Paragraph, a Heading or a Image block. You remove a block by clicking on the three dots on the right side of the block (picture above) and then: Remove Block.
Do you want to learn more about working with blocks? This video gives a quick introduction.

Create subheadings
Ok, back to the editing. If you want to creat subheadings, you use a different type of block than the Paragraph block. Move your mouse over the text you want to transform into a subheading. Move to the Paragraph symbol on the left. It will turn into a Change block or style button. Click and then select Heading.

Now the Paragraph block is changed into a Heading block. In the top bar you can change the properties of the heading. In this text I use the H3 headings as subheadings. For the sake of consistency, aplly the same style of heading to the same instances.

Author and excerpt
With the above described steps, you can edit the post. Before you press, publish, take a look at the bottom of the Edit post screen. You will find a drop down with the title Author above it, here you can select the author (in the last step of this blog you find how to add your profile so it will appear in this list). In the Excerpt write down a short summary of the blog. It will be the small text on the blog page that gives an overview of the posts. The length of the text in the picture below will result in three lines of text. Longer texts will be cut off.

Featured image
Almost there. Before publishing, add the featured image to the post. This image will appear with the title and the excerpt on the blog page. At the right of the Edit post screen, select Document (just below the Preview button). Select Featured image and click on Set featured image.

You now entered the Media Library (image below). This is the place where all images used on the website are presented in one overview. You can either select existing images, but also upload new images. Click on Upload Files and then Select Files. Brows to the location of the image (make it yourself, or search via Google for images free of copyrights) on your computer, select and upload it (it will get a blue frame and a blue box with checkmark). It will now appear in the Media Library. Click on the image to select it. On the right you see a few fields. Here you can give the image a name and a caption (I put the credits in). Click on the Set featured image button.

Publish
That is about it! Go to the top right of the Edit post screen and hit the Publish button. Select Private if you do not want to publish the post publicly (only logged in users can see it). Go to the blog page and enjoy the result!
Back to the Dashboard
If you want to leave the Edit post screen, click on the WordPress logo in the top left corner.
Edit your post again
After closing your post, you will find it in the left vertical bar of the backend under Posts > All Posts. You see an overview of the published articles. Click Edit if you want to continue working on the post, click Trash if you want to delete it, click View if you want to see it on the frontend. If you click Quick Edit you can do some basic editing such as changing the post from public to private, adding categories and tags, and change the title.

Add your profile
As you will see when you look at my example post on the frontend of the site, you see my name and photo just below the title and a larger photo and bio below the post. If you want to change your information, click on Profile (the one below Posts) and Add New in the vertical bar left of the Dasboard. Here you can type in your name (in the white bar below Add New Profile) provide links to social media accounts (the fields at the bottom of the page), add a profile picture (Featured image on the right), and add a short bio (the white field below).
