Writing WordPress Posts

Step-by-Step Guide to Effective Posting

This is a writing aid for NSC website contributors and editors, especially those new to writing posts.

Open a Blank Post

Title

Enter a title but be prepared to change it later. By default, WordPress no longer puts the title in “title case” (every word capitalized) but our standard is to capitalize all words except for articles (unless they begin the heading) and any conjunctions (and, but etc) or prepositions (to, at, on, in etc) of fewer than four letters. Prepositions that give the verb meaning (phrasal verbs) should also be capitalized. (E.g. Do Without, Fall Behind In, Get By With, Look Forward To, Watch Out For.)

The page or post title will be in the format of “Heading 1” or “H1” by default. Subheadings are H2, H3 etc. Google and other search engines focus on H1 titles as well as H2 and H3. (Never change the default settings of the headings nor of those in the right margin toolbar.)

Keep the title short. For example, rather than “Bring on the Bay Swim This Weekend: Notice of Short Harbour Closing”, shorten it to “Harbour Closing for Bring on the Bay Swim – Sat., July 13”. Note that “Harbour Closing” is at the beginning of the title because it’s the most important idea, and it will serve as a key phrase to be repeated a couple more times in the post. (And keep the title under 60 characters to optimize SEO.) 

Tip: Do not use “this weekend”, “tomorrow night”. Such terms are meaningless after a little time passes. Use the specific date and time. (See “Dates and Times” below.)

Dates and times

This is a condensation of nsc.ca date and time format conventions. The full explanation of date and time formatting is available on the Date and Time Format page.

1. If you include a date in the title
   1. Precede the date with a dash ” – ” with spaces on either side
   2. Abbreviate the day and month with three-letter abbreviations:
      Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
      Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
   3. Leave out the year.
   4. Don’t use ordinals like 1st, 2nd, 23rd, etc. Just August 1, 2, 23.
      E.g. Crane Familiarization Session, Thu, Aug 23, 6 pm.
      
2. If you include a time
   1. Add it at the end of the title, with a comma.
   2. Write times using the 12-hour clock, like 6 pm, not 1800 hours. It’s clearer for most.
      E.g. Crane Familiarization Session, Thu, Aug 23, 6 pm.
      
3. Within the body of text of the post, days and months are to be written out in full.
   
4. For dates related to administrative aspects of the website, the international format yyyy-mm-dd is used so there is no confusion in dates of the first 12 days of any month.

Body of Text

Paste in the body of text. It works best if you copy the text from a downloaded document rather than from an image (like a preview in a browser). All hidden codes from a document are automatically stripped away and the text should format automatically in the post. If you copy the text from an image, you’ll have to remove all the line breaks manually.

But come back to the title at the end of designing your post. Do not necessarily use the title that somebody submitted because you’ll need to choose a key phrase from the post that works best for search engine optimization (SEO). (The clever SEO software on the website will guide you.)

Tip: Hitting the Enter key at the end of a line inserts a space between paragraphs, which is what we need. If you have single lines that require no empty line between them, press Shift + Enter.

If you want a bulleted or numbered list, hit enter to create a new block, and either type “/list”

or choose the block type from the block inserter (“+” box) and type the block type you need.

The main thrust first

Put the main point of the post at the top. This is what displays on the website’s splash page before the post is opened. Try to limit it to 3 short, attention-getting lines that will want to make the reader click on “Read more.” (Note that there is no need to insert a “More” divider, like in the old website, since the display length is automatically set for every post.)

Refrain from using bold, and do not use UPPERCASE, or any colour. These are reserved for emergency messages, safety announcements, and any topic that addresses potential danger to life and property.

Formatting to Comply with AODA

Keep sentences and paragraphs relatively short. Don’t use special formatting (bold, italics, etc) in the text since screen readers cannot read it. Use illustrations or images to break up the “wall of text”. (See the AODA guidelines for specifics.)

Give credit

If someone has submitted the content, at the bottom of the post, give credit:

Submitted by [name]

Add a Meta Description

Write a “Meta description” in the box at the bottom of the draft page. That’s the short description that search engines and social networks display below your post title. If you don’t write a custom meta description, then search engines simply grab the first few sentences and cut them off—not helpful.

So just summarize the post in your own words as a custom meta description. Keep it under 160 characters long. (There is a bar below it that will display green when it’s the right length.)

Use Appropriate Text for Hyperlinks

To take full advantage of search engine optimization (SEO), we may no longer use links like “Details here” or “this page” for hyperlinks. Search engine optimization requires that key information be included in the hyperlink because Google tracks all of our hyperlinks on our website and will promote those links in search results. For example, “See this page for more on how to view documents in Box.”

See this Ultimate WordPress SEO Guide for Beginners regarding hyperlinks.
See more on using internal links to optimize SEO in WordPress at this site.

To add a hyperlink, select the text you want to embed the hyperlink in and click on the link button (or press Ctrl+K).

In the dialog box that opens, you can start typing the name of the page or post and it should appear as one of the choices that appear below. The more of the page or post name you type, the higher in the list the page you’re looking for will appear. Or you can just paste the link in manually.

If the link is external to nsc.ca, then click the top button to have a new tab open, which is our nsc.ca practice. Click the second button to stop search engines from following the link. This is because we want search engines to stay within our website.

Legacy Page Logs

On many pages in edit mode, you will see a page log in an HTML box like this:

You may edit this box if you are familiar with HTML code and it is helpful to us (but it is not strictly necessary*). By clicking on “Preview,” you can see what your changes look like before you save the page using the “Update” button. It will look like this:

*This is because the website’s dashboard lists changed posts and pages, and a version comparison reveals what has been done when.

Settings Pane

Now we move over to the settings pane on the right to make the page display and perform the way we need. If the settings pane is not displayed, click on the Settings icon to the right of the “Update” button.

If your cursor is in an individual block, the block pane will be displayed and you’ll need to click on “Post” (or “Page” if it’s a page you’re editing).

Choose Good Permalinks

1. What’s a permalink? It is the text that appears after “https://nsc.ca/an/blog/_____” as part of the URL for the post. By default, WordPress makes the permalink a concatenation of the words in the title, separated by hyphens.
   
   For example, the default permalink for this post was “https://nsc.ca/an/blog/tips-on-writing-wordpress-posts-for-nsc.ca”, but that’s quite a mouthful! So it has been manually shortened to “https://nsc.ca/an/blog/writing-wordpress-posts/”.
   
   Note: It’s a good idea to see what the URL of similar posts is to try to keep them consistent in format.
   
   Edit the permalink in the Settings pane to the right by simply clicking on the URL. Once you’re done, just close the box by clicking on the “x”.
   
   
   
2. If the post is a report, add the year to the permalink, as in “https://nsc.ca/an/blog/bring-on-the-bay-report-2023/”, since the same permalink may be used for the same event in future years.
   Tip: In a new tab of nsc.ca, search for the event title to try to find a past post’s permalink to copy, so there’s uniformity in the URLs.
   
   
3. However, other than reports, some posts are reused from year to year to save backup space, e.g. for event advertisements or announcements. In such a case, do not use the date in the permalink for a post or for events that might be rescheduled.

Set Posts to Expire

Set posts to expire when their validity date has passed. While they sometimes age off, they often don’t, particularly in the quieter months of the year. While “expiring” them makes them disappear from the splash page, they are still visible on the News page. This enables readers to see all past posts they may have missed. Expired posts are also visible in searches.

In the Settings Pane on the right, make sure the “Enable Future Action” box is checked. Leave the action “Select Other Categories”, then type the category “Expired”. Set your time and date to expire the post.

Categories

By default, the category “Notice” is selected. Be sure to uncheck it, otherwise all posts will be “notices” and will be useless when searching. Be judicious when choosing the categories that apply to your post. In a sense, all posts could be for members to see, but don’t check the members category.

The first category you check off will appear at the bottom as the primary category, and you may need to change that manually. In this example, PR was checked first and website second, but “Website” is more important. Tags also help with searching for posts.

Featured Image

We always need a featured image for posts. This is the image that is displayed above the post on the splash page of the website. (In pages, it displays behind the title bar.)

Do not use images containing text. This is because the images are automatically cropped, and the text in them is usually cut off. Also, AODA does not allow text in images since they are not machine-readable.

See important instructions on this page regarding the use of images.

Excerpt

This is not needed unless you want a different text to display with the post on the website’s splash page. It will replace the beginning text of your post.

Discussion

Leave the boxes regarding comments and pingbacks unchecked. We do not allow this currently.

Raw HTML

Ignore this section.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is something that we emphasize in the new website so that people can find content more easily. The Yoast SEO effectiveness indicator is both in the Settings pane on the right and at the bottom of the page.

There are red, yellow and green bullets that indicate how well the SEO has been utilized. (These are recommendations and do not need to be followed rigidly.) Each time you alter your page title or text to improve the SEO, the bulleted points will move from the red to the green section. The bullets do not all need to be green to satisfy the SEO. You will see the red sad face turn happier with each additional SEO improvement you make.

Read more about Yoast SEO on the Yoast page here.

Preview Before Publishing

This button beside the “Update” or “Publish” button allows you to preview your post or page to see what it will look like on a tablet or mobile phone. While the default preview is “Desktop,” it is better to “Preview in new tab” for the cleanest view.

Do not hit the “Publish” or “Update” button to save your work. That creates too many versions that take up valuable storage space. There is an automatic backup that saves your work.

Do a preview of your work before you publish. When you do, you will be surprised how many things you notice on a clean new display that you had missed in your draft and will want to correct.

Further Resources

Here’s a great intro video on how to create a post in a slightly older-looking interface. (Note that we do not currently allow comments.)

Thank You!

Thank you for being a contributor to NSC life, activities and communications!

Please send feedback and comments to webmaster@nsc.ca.