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The thing you’ll probably find yourself doing more than anything with WordPress is writing posts. So, how do you do it? Ok – assuming you’re starting with a new post, from your dashboard click on Posts > Add new and you’ll be taken to the main editor up at the top you have a place for your title, just like you would if you were writing an email.

There are no rules about titling, but it’s a good idea to think of something enticing, something that’s going to make people want to read more of your post. This is your headline, your chance to let people know what’s inside. Under that you’ve got the body of the post – here you can write whatever you like, and format it with the same tools you’ll see in any word processor – Bold, Italic and so on along with some less familiar ones that we’ll cover in the next video. Write something cool here and if you like you can use the icons up top to insert photos, video, music other media, or a PollDaddy poll.

Once you’re happy you can set about adding some categories or tags to your post and you have the option of saving a draft, rather than putting a post out live right away. Previewing your post so you can see how it will look when you publish or publishing the post to the web. Before you do that, you might want to think about whether you’d like the post to be public viewable by anyone or private, and thus password protected. Also, if you’d like to set your post to publish later on or on another day or date. You can change publish time by clicking the Edit here and adapting the date to taste. After you publish, you can of course check out the live version of your post by clicking the blog title and can then go back in the edit the post if you need to via the Edit menu.

Those are basics of putting a post together and publishing it. In other videos, we’ll look at the details of the Toolbar working with media and other features such as categories, trackbacks and tags, and what they’re all about.