WordPress Reading Settings

Next choose the “Front Page Displays” (your homepage) option that you’d like and click the save button and you’re all set!  If you haven’t yet created a homepage, add a new page named “Home”  and return to the Reading Settings and set your new “Home” page as your Front Page.

For ITegrity built websites, if you want to set one of your existing pages to be your homepage and don’t want it to appear in your website’s main navigation, first set the page as your Front Page.  Next go to pageMash in you “Pages” tab and hide the page.  This will prevent the page from appearing in your website navigation as a normal page, but will appear as your homepage and also when a user clicks on the “Home” link your navigation.

When a colleague recently asked me about best practices for linking between pages on his WordPress site, I decided to do some research to see if there was a better way to accomplish this than the built in WordPress standard HTML URL linking tool.  Adding internal links throughout your website is enhances user experience, marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).  For example, you may mention a number of your company’s featured products and services on your home page for which you’ve created a separate sales or detail page for each one elsewhere within your website.  It’s good practice to hyperlink each p/s on your home page to each of their corresponding individual pages, because it gives your site visitors an additional opportunity to delve deeper into your website instead of solely relying on them to use your main site navigation.  Internal linking is also recognized and valued by search engine crawlers and will contribute to a more [cref website-maintenance positive ranking for your site].

The first method you could use to link to another page or post within your WordPress website is to use the included link tool in the text editor that appears when adding or editing a page or post.  However, this method is best suited for external hyperlinking to other sites than your own, because if you decide to change a page or post name or move it to another location within your website, all the links referenced to it will break.  Every time you rename or move a page or post you’ll have to find all the hyperlinks in your website that point to it and update them.  As your website scales and grows you can easily image how difficult this would become to manage.  Nevertheless, it’s useful to know how to use the link tool for external linking.

WordPress Link Tool

To use the link tool, first select the text you want to hyperlink by highlighting it with your cursor.  The link tool (“chainlink” icon button) will then illuminate in the text editor toolbar.  Clicking on the link button will open a new window with options to link your selected text.

WordPress Insert Hyperlink

Copy your link URL into the corresponding field and you’re ready to go.  You may also choose to configure any of the other options for example, to enhance accessibility and keep visitors from closing your website in their browser when following your external links to another website (setting the Target propery to “Open in New Window (_blank)”.

Internal Linking Best Practices

A better, more dynamic method to internally link, or cross-reference your pages and posts would be to reference them by a unique ID number or Slug name.  This way if you a move a page the link doesn’t change.  It doesn’t matter where the page is physically located in your website, our only concern is the static unique identifier of the page.

Fortunately there is an easy way to accomplish this through the use of the Cross-references WordPress plugin.  To understand how to effectively use the Cross-references plugin, you’ll need to know a little bit about how WordPress names your pages.

Each page and post in WordPress is assigned an ID number and if you were to use WordPress out of the box you’ll see it names all your pages and posts by a unique number that shows up in its URL.  Remember page names and page titles are different; names are the unique name of your page in the URL, Titles are the heading you choose at the top your page or post.

Many WordPress users change the default number based naming convention in their admin settings in favor of text based permalinks, a more website visitor and search engine friendly convention.  WordPress websites and blogs are database driven, that is all of your content is stored in a database and retrieved when a site visitor navigates to a certain page. Permalinks aka a permanent link, is a URL that points to a specific page or post after the content data is pulled from the database and is human readable.

When adding a new page or post, text based permalinks are then automatically created by WordPress to mirror your page or post title. The permalink for this article is: http://www.itegritygroup.com/seo-web-development-blog/index.php/2009/03/wordpress-hyperlinking-posts-pages/ . If we didn’t use permalinks, the URL for this page would look something like http://www.itegritygroup.com/seo-web-development-blog/index.php/page?id=294/ . Not very user friendly.

If you don’t want to name your page the same as your page title, you can edit the page name portion of your permalink in the area just below your page title. Your page name is also referred to as a Slug.

WordPress Permalink

Page Naming (Permalinks)

It’s a good idea when possible to keep your page names to between one and four words separated by dashes.  You can use more than four words, however search engines will weight each individual word less as you add more words.  You’ll also want to strip out any words in your page name that aren’t relevant to someone searching on the internet to find your content.  The default permalink for this post is my website URL + the location of my WordPress site +  my page title (Slug): http://www.itegritygroup.com/seo-web-development-blog/index.php/2009/03/adding-links-between-pages-on-your-wordpress-website.  There are way too many words in the page name and some that are completely irrelevant to someone who is trying to locate content about linking pages in WordPress, like “to” and “your”.  I chose to name my page …wordpress-hyperlinking-post-pages because these are the keywords I’ve determined individuals are mostly likely to use when searching for my content.  This unique identifier for my page wordpress-hyperlinking-post-pages is my page’s Slug.

Using the Cross-references Plugin

Once you’ve installed the Cross-references WordPress plugin (*ITegrity built websites already have the Cross-references plugin installed & configured) you’ll find the link to it’s configuration page under the Settings link in your website’s admin area.

Cross-references Settings (your menu may appear differently)

Click on the Cross-references link to open the configuration page.  For most websites, you should be able to leave most of the options as is, however there are a few you may want change.

By default the “Post Identification by” is set to ID.  If you are using permalinks it’s better to change the value to “Slug (name)”.  Using the Slug instead of ID will save you time when you cross-link pages and posts and is a more intuitive than using an ID number.

“Related Post List” determines whether the plugin will insert a related posts list at the bottom of each page and post.  This means the Cross-references plugin will list all the pages and posts you’ve linked to internally from a particular page or post.  It’s a matter of personal preference as to how you set this, but I prefer to not show the related posts and pages.  The other settings on the Cross-references options page usually don’t need to be changed unless you want to use the plugins more advanced features.

Now that you’ve got the Cross-references plugin configured properly, how do you actually add the links to your pages and post?  Cross-references uses simple syntax for you to add your links:

[cref “slug-name”]
Example: [cref wordpress-hyperlinking-posts-pages]
Result when published: [cref wordpress-hyperlinking-posts-pages]

In the above example we used the syntax [cref followed by the Slug name of the page or post we want to link to, ending with ]. In this case the link will appear as “Adding Hyperlinks to Your WordPress Website” because that is the page title of the Slug, “wordpress-hyperlinking-posts-pages”.

What if you want to create a link to a page or post, but you want the text link to be something other than the title? In the example below, we slightly change the syntax to accomplish this:

[cref “slug-name” “text you want to be linked”]
Example: [cref wordpress-hyperlinking-posts-pages How to Cross-link Pages in WordPress]
Result when published: [cref wordpress-hyperlinking-posts-pages How to Cross-link Pages in WordPress]

All we did differently was add a space after the Slug name and then add the text for which we want to be linked, in this case, How to Cross-link Pages in WordPress. The example below shows you how the Cross-references plugin syntax is used in this article in an previous paragraph:

Cross-references Plugin Syntax

Changing Page Titles and Slugs and Updating Your Links

Once you start adding links to your website and blog in this manner, you may begin to wonder what happens if you decide to change one of your page titles. No problem. All of your links’ text are automatically updated whenever any of your page or post titles change. But what happens if I decide to change the Slug name of a page or post? Will it break all my links because the links are now using an old Slug name? Yes, however the Cross-references plugin provides a tool to update all of your links with one simple procedure. Remember the advanced settings at the bottom of Cross-references options page in your admin? Near the bottom is an area called Tools. The first option is

Cross-references Slug Rename Tool

Using traditional static hyperlinks to cross link pages and posts quickly becomes a nuisance as your site scales. Adding and managing internal links within your WordPress website is made into a much easier process when using the Cross-references plugin.

pageMash works in conjunction with your website’s multi-level dropdown site navigation menu. By changing the settings in pageMash, you can manipulate the order of your page links in your navigation, the placment of your links, beit in the main navigaition or in a dropdown menu under a main link, or whether or not the page link will even appear at all in your navigation. Let’s take a look at how this works.

WordPress Pages Menu

After you’ve logged into the admin area of your WordPress website, click on the menu expansion arrow next to the “Page” link in the left side navigation. Next click on the pageMash link in the Pages menu.

After you’ve completed these steps, the pageMash admin page will open and show a graphical representation of the pages you’ve already added to your website. Keep in mind pageMash will show all your pages, even ones that are still unpublished drafts and even though these pages will not appear in your websites navigation until they are published. This feature allows you to prearrange pages before they are published for public consumption. In the example below, the page “RSS” is still a draft, however we placed it in the dropdown menu below “News” because once we are ready to publish it, that’s where we want it to appear.

pageMash Example

Main page links in your website’s navigation are referred to as “parents” or “top-level” links. The page links that appear below the parent links are referred to as “child” links. In the example above the page “Board” is a child of it’s parent “Membership”. This means Board will appear in the dropdown menu below Membership when a visitor to your site mouses over Membership.

WordPress Dropdown Navigation Menu

To change the order of your pages links in your website’s navigation, simply drag the page you want to the desired location. If you want to make a certain page link a child of another one of your pages, drag it over the desired parent page link without releasing your mouse button and then continue to drag it just to right of the parent page link. By dragging the page link to the right of the parent link, you’ll see it appear under the parent link slightly indented. This shows you it will be in the child position once you release your mouse button.

Membership "parent" | Board "child"

pageMash also has a few more important functions, the first of which is the ability to hide pages from your navigation. You may for example, create a page for your website that you don’t want to be visible in your site’s navigation, as neither a main parent link or as a child in the dropdown. This could be a page that is linked to from within another one of your pages, like a information request form or application page for a product or service.

To hide a page from you navigation, mouse over the small arrow icon next to the page link.

pageMash Page Link Menu

This will a produce a pop-up menu with three options: [edit] [hide] [Rename]. Move your mouse over [hide] and click. Unfortunately you’ll have to move your mouse very precisely from the page link across the pop-up menu to [hide]. If you mouse off the pop-up menu even slightly, it will disappear.

Once you’ve clicked on [hide], the page link will become grayed out. This means the page link is now hidden in your websites navigation. It’s good practice to view your website to test to make sure the page is indeed hidden.

pageMash Hidden Navigation

The [edit] link has the same functionality as the “Edit” link in the Page menu; it’s a shortcut that opens the text editor allowing you to edit the page. Clicking on [Rename] will provide you the option to change the page’s name directly in pageMash without having to go through the extra clicks of accomplishing the same task in the Page menu of the admin.

*For ITegrity WordPress websites: Did you notice your Home page link in pageMash is hidden, but still appears in your website navigation? This is an anomaly and an exception to pageMash because you are using a custom built ITegrity WordPress template that has extra functionality included. The Multi-level Navigation plugin that powers your website’s navigation has been modified by ITegrity to accomodate the small seperator line images between your page links. Although this may seem like a simple detail, it isn’t included in the base functionality of the Multi-level Navigation. Your Home page link must stay hidden in pageMash otherwise you’ll have duplicate Home page links appear in your websites navigation.

To download Thunderbird, go to http://www.mozillamessaging.com .   To install Thunderbird for Windows, simply click on the “Download Thunderbird Icon”.  If you are using Mac or another operating system, or you want to install Thunderbird in a different language, click on the link below the icon, “Other Systems & Languages” . After you’ve finished downloading and installing Thunderbird, you’ll be prompted to setup a new account to get started. For the account type, select Email Account and then click the Next button.

Thunderbird New Email Account

On the Identity screen, enter your name the way you want it to appear for recipients of your email.  Next enter the email address you are setting up in Thunderbird.

Thunderbird Identity

On the Server Information screen, choose your server type and then enter your incoming and outgoing mail server names.

Thunderbird Server Information

Next enter your Incoming and Outgoing user names.  Most email hosts (your email provider) use either your full email address as your user name or just the portion of your email address before the @ symbol.  In most cases the incoming and outgoing user names will be identical.

Thunderbird User Name

Enter the name you’d like your email account to be called in Thunderbird.  Many users simply chose to use their email address.

Thunderbird Account Name

Enter your email account password and hit OK.

Thunderbird Password

Depending on your email host, you may be ready to start using Thunderbird to send and receive your email.  However for some hosts, you’ll need to complete a few more steps.  To check to see if you’re able to receive email, click on the “Get Mail”  icon in top left corner of the main menu.  If everything works fine, you’re all set.  If not you’ll need to get more information from your email host.  I’ll demonstrate how to set alternate settings for those using GoDaddy.

In the Thunderbird main menu at the top of your screen, click on Tools and then Account Settings.  Once the Account Settings dialog box pops up, click on Outgoing Server (SMTP) in the left menu.  Next select your email address and click on the Edit button.  A new window will appear prompting you for settings.  Change the port number from the default of 25 to 80.  Click OK.

Thunderbird Outgoing Server

Now choose Server Settings from the left menu.  If you want to change how your email is stored on your hosts server you can set the properties on this page.

Click on the “Get Mail”  icon in top left corner of the main menu and if you are able to send and receive emails, you should now be set up and ready to begin using Thunderbird.

To add a PDF to WordPress for your visitors to download into their web browser and view in Adobe Reader, you’ll be uploading your PDF file to WordPress and adding a link to it on your post or page. First, log in to the Admin area of WordPress. Next either create a new post or page, or edit an already existing one that you want to add your PDF to. Once the WordPress text editor loads, click on the “Add Media” icon in the Upload/Insert bar.

WordPress Add Media Icon

A new dialog box will appear on your screen prompting you to add a media file from your computer. WordPress has two methods to upload a file, a Flash based version and a regular browser version. If you have problems uploading your PDF with the Flash uploader, try using the “Browser uploader” instead.

WordPress Browser Uploader Option

Using the uploader, browse to your PDF file on your computer and click on the open button to upload the file. Once you’ve successfully uploaded your file, another new screen will appear with options for your PDF.

Title: The name of your PDF and how the link will read to your WordPress website visitors on your page. The PDF file link title.
Caption: You can leave this blank because you are simply creating a link in WordPress to your PDF file to view.
Description: You can leave this blank.
Link URL: Please click on the “File URL” button. This will show the link location of the PowerPoint file you just uploaded to WordPress in the “Link URL” field.

Next choose “Insert into Post (or Page)” at the bottom of the window. Now you should see a hyperlink on your page with the title you chose linking to your PDF. When a website visitor clicks on the hyperlink, your PDF will download into the their browser for them to view.

It’s a good habit to always test a new hyperlink to make sure it works properly before publishing it to your website. To test the link and have the results appear in a new window (so your browser doesn’t try to open the link in the same window you’re working in in WordPress making your work disappear) hold down the Ctrl key while clicking on the link. If the link works correctly, you’re finished. If it doesn’t, highlight the link and click on the “Insert/ edit link” icon in the text editor toolbar. The icon should be located in the top row of the toolbar near the middle and has a chain link graphic (if you have a WordPress plugin installed that adds functionality to your editor toolbar like TinyMCE Advanced, the icon may be in a different location).

A new window will pop up showing you the link for the highlighted text. Double check to make sure it is correct.

Adding a PDF file to your WordPress website is a fairly straightforward process. Most PDFs are readable by search engines which means they’ll help with your website ranking. If you have PDF files you’ve written in the past that are relevant to your WordPress website, then it may be a good idea to add them to your site. The more content you can add, the better.

[googleplusauthor]

In the main menu at the top of the main window in Outlook, go to Tools–>Account Settings. In the new window that appears, make sure the “E-Mail” tab is active. Next, select the email account you want to be your default account. Outlook makes the first email in the list your default email account, so if it is already set correctly, you don’t need to change anything. To determine which email account is your default, select an account and look at the “Set as Default” icon. If it is grayed out, then the email account you have selected is your default. If it is black, then it is not. To make an account your default account, select that account and click on the “Set as Default” icon. When you’re finished, hit the close button.

Outlook Default Email Setting

When sending email you don’t  always have to use your default account. Click on the “New” button to compose a new email. If you want to change the email account you’ll be sending from for this email, click on the “Account” button.  From the drop down menu, choose the email address from which you want to send your email.

One thing to be cognizant of is if you receive an email from someone addressed to one of your non-default email addresses and try to respond to it from your default email address, or any other email account other than the one it was sent to, you may receive a “505” mail returned error. For example, if an email was sent to abc@my-website.com and you directly reply to it from xyz@my-website.com, the error may occur. Some hosting companies won’t allow you to directly reply to an email using a different email address. If this happens, make sure when responding you are sending from the email address it was sent to. Outlook should automatically do this for you, but it doesn’t always happen and can be frustrating to deal with. To respond to an email from a different email account than it was sent to, simply copy the contents of the received email into an entirely new email and reply from the email account of your choice.

Managing multiple accounts in Outlook can seem unwieldy at first, but once you get into the pattern of doing it, you’ll find it easy to use.

The first step is to get your email address(es) setup with your website hosting company.  If you’ve already accomplished this please skip ahead to “Configuring Outlook”.

Adding Email Addresses To Your Web Hosting Account

The first step is to log in to your website hosting service account. Unfortunately, each website hosting company has a different interface for managing your account and the procedure you’ll need to follow to get your email up and running can varies widely. If you have trouble navigating your host’s website, the best thing to do is to either call your hosting company and ask for help or use their online help files for direction.

Because GoDaddy is the most popular hosting service today, I’ll provide a quick tutorial on how to set up your email using their website.

Use your internet browser to navigate to http://www.godaddy.com. Next, log in to the website with either your account number or user name with password. In the top navigation of the site, click on “Email” and then in the drop down choose “My Email Account”. A new sub-window will appear within the page with your email account plan options.

If you don’t already have an active email account, use a credit to create a new account. Don’t worry if this process seems a bit confusing; GoDaddy’s email account setup isn’t very intuitive. One thing to keep in mind is their are two common types of email accounts GoDaddy provides you with a standard hosting account: personal email for a single email address and a 100 email address pack. If you unintentionally choose the single email setup, you can always go back and use another credit to add a 100 pack.

At this point you’ll want to click on “Manage Account” which will take you to your email account control panel.

Once in the email control panel, click on the “add” button to create a new email address. Repeat this step for each email address you want to add.

During this process on the individual email account setup screen, you’ll notice a check box that says “Make Catchall Account”. By checking this box, you’ll make that email address the default account that receives all email sent to “any-email-address@your-domain.com”. In other words, any email directed to an email address on your domain that doesn’t have an existing address set up, will get sent to the “Catch All Account”. A Catchall account can be useful because a potential client may mistakingly enter in an invalid email address @your-domain.com thinking you received it when otherwise you wouldn’t have. The downside is, you’ll receive more junk mail because the Catchall email account will receive all email sent to any email address directed toward your domain that isn’t valid. If you’re not receiving a lot of junk mail, it’s a good idea to set the Catchall, but if you find your inbox becoming overwhelmed with spam, then it may be time to turn it off.

Anther setting to note is your mail box size. Some hosts like GoDaddy set the mailbox size default value very low, for example, 10mb. If you’re setting up a large number of email accounts and your host provides limited email account space size, you’ll need to leave yourself enough space to divide up amongst all your email accounts. If you only have a few to setup, you’ll want to increase the size. 50mb to 100mb per account is a good size to be safe.

After you’ve finished adding your new email accounts, log out of  GoDaddy and start up Outlook.

Configuring Outlook

In the main menu at the top of the Outlook screen, go to Tools–>Account Settings. A new window will popup with some options. With the “E-Mail” tab active, click on “new” the icon.

Another new window will appear prompting you to enter information about how Outlook will connect to your hosted email account and how it will appear to others receiving email from you.

User Information: Enter your name or other name as you’d like it to appear when sending email from this account.
E-Mail Address: Enter the email address of the account you are setting up.
Server Information: You’ll need to obtain this information from your website/email hosting company. For GoDaddy at the time of this writing, the account type is POP3, incoming mail server: pop.secureserver.net, Outgoing mail server (SMTP): smtpout.secureserver.net.
Logon Information: The username and password you associated with this account when creating it with your website host. Check the “remember password” box to avoid having to enter your login information everytime Outlook attempts to retrieve your email from your host (by default every 10 minutes!).  GoDaddy users should leave the “Require logon using Secure Password Authentication (SPA)” box unchecked.

When you’ve completed the information in this window, chances are you still have a few more settings to make depending on your hosting company’s email server settings, but occasionally this is all you need to do. Click on the “Test Account Settings” button to see if you can successfully send and receive email from your hosts email server through Outlook. If you don’t receive any errors and get a successful test connection, congratulations, you’re technically ready to begin using your email in Outlook. However, you’ll still want to add your information to the “General” page in the “Advanced Settings” area. For the rest of us, including GoDaddy users, there are a few more steps to complete.

First, let’s finish the “General” settings by clicking on the “More Settings” button. With the “General” tab active, complete the information requested. Once complete, you’ll need to look at the next three tab windows to make sure your settings match the instructions provided by your hosting company. Each company has their email servers setup differently, so you’ll need to know what settings to use to finish your setup in Outlook.

Again, I’ll provide the settings GoDaddy uses which could be the same as your host, but not necessarily. Choose the “Outgoing Server” tab to activate it’s window. Check “My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication”. Also if it’s not already ticked, check “Use same settings as my incoming mail server”.

Outlook Outgoing Server Settings

In the “Connection” tab window, you shouldn’t need to change anything. It should already be set to connect using your local area network (LAN). If not, tick the box next to this setting.

Outlook Connection Settings

Finally, activate the “Advanced” tab and set the Incoming server (POP3) to “110” and the Outgoing server (SMTP) to “80”. Make sure the “This server requires an encrypted connection (SSL)” box is unchecked.

(For non-GoDaddy users, your best bet here is to use the Outlook default settings of “110” and “25” respectively. If this doesn’t work, you can try changing the Outgoing server (SMTP) from”25″ to “26”. Sometimes the ISPs you’ll be sending email from will block port “25” in an attempt to prevent spam email and your email will inadvertently get blocked).

“Use the following type of encrypted connection” should be set to none.

The “Delivery” section settings are up to you as a matter of preference. This depends on how much space you allocated to your email account with your host. If you set your email account to have a size of 50mb or more, you may want to check the box for “Leave a copy of messages on the server”, then check “Remove from server after “10” days. This will leave a copy of all emails you receive on the email server of your host for 10 days in essence providing you a 10 day backup of all your emails in case something bad happens to your computer or Outlook were to become corrupted.

If you’ve set your email account to have a lower mailbox size limit, you’ll want to uncheck these boxes so you don’t run the risk of having too many emails pile up on your host’s email server before they can be deleted by Outlook. This way you’ll avoid reaching your mailbox size limit and producing the unfortunate event of bouncing all your new incoming emails because you’ve run out of space.

Outlook Advanced Settings

Click on the OK button to accept your settings. Now click on the “Test Account Settings” button again to make sure everything is setup correctly. If you still receive errors, you’ll need to double check all your settings to make sure they are correct according to your hosting company. If you don’t receive any errors, you should now be officially set up in Outlook to begin sending and receiving email.

1. Downloadable PowerPoint Presentation from WordPress

In this scenario you’ll be uploading your PowerPoint presentation file to WordPress and adding a link to it in a post or page. To add a PowerPoint presentation to WordPress for your visitors to download onto their computer and view in PowerPoint, first log in to the Admin area of WordPress. Next either create a new post or page, or edit an already existing one that you want to add your PowerPoint presentation to. Once in the WordPress text editor, click on the “Add Media” icon next to the Upload/Insert bar.

WordPress Add Media Icon

A new dialog box will pop up on your screen prompting you to upload a file. WordPress has two methods to upload a file, a Flash based version and a regular browser version. If you have problems uploading your PowerPoint with the Flash uploader, try using the “Browser uploader” instead.

WordPress Browser Uploader Option

Using the uploader, browse to the PowerPoint file on your computer and click on the open button to upload the file. Once you’ve successfully uploaded your file, another new screen will appear with options for your PowerPoint presentation file.

Title: The name of your PowerPoint file in WordPress and how the link will read to your website visitors on your page.
Caption: You can leave this blank because you are simply creating a link in WordPress to your PowerPoint file to download.
Description: You can leave this blank.
Link URL: This is very important. Please click on the “File URL” button. This will show the link location of the PowerPoint file you just uploaded to WordPress in the “Link URL” field.

Next choose “Insert into Post (or Page)” at the bottom of the screen. Now you should see a hyperlink on your page with the title you chose linking to your PowerPoint file. When a visitor to your website clicks on the hyperlink, a download window will pop up asking them to either save the file on their computer or open it. That’s it!

2. Protected PowerPoint file in Interactive Video Format for WordPress: SlideShare

If you want your PowerPoint presentation to be protected where your site visitors can only view your PowerPoint, but can’t alter it or download the original PowerPoint file, converting your presentation to an interactive Flash FLV movie is the way to go. There are quite a few websites and software packages available to convert PowerPoint files to Flash movies. A free, easy to use online solution is SlideShare, proclaimed as the world’s largest community for sharing presentations.

SlideShare Presentation

You’ll need to create a free online account on SlideShare to begin using it’s features. After your profile is activated, you’re ready to begin uploading your PowerPoint presentations to be converted. Once you’ve completed the upload and conversion process, there are a number of ways you can get your presentation over to WordPress.

First, and probably the easiest method, is to copy your SlideShare presentation URL or the “secret URL” provided to you by SlideShare and copy it to your WordPress page as a hyper link. Use the text formatting toolbar in WordPress to add a new link on your page and paste the SlideShare link as the link URL. You can also go to the Widget page on SlideShare and choose “Minibadge” to get code for a SlideShare button you can alternately add to your WordPress page.

WordPress Add a Link

The drawback to this method is when a user clicks on the link or button, they’ll be re-directed to the SlideShare website away from your WordPress site to view your presentation. If this isn’t desirable, another option is to embed your presentation directly into your WordPress page.

Go to the Widgets area on SlideShare and add a Presentation Pack widget. Set all the properties for the widget the way you like and copy the embed code SlideShare provides you. Next, in WordPress while working on your page with the text editor, switch to HTML view.

WordPress HTML View

Once in the HTML view, paste your SlideShare embed code into the location in your page you’d like it to appear. Now when a visitor goes to your website to view the content where the SlideShare presentation is embedded, they’ll be able view and interact with it directly on your site.

A second option for embedding a SlideShare presentation into your WordPress site is to install and use the SlideShare WordPress plugin. Yet another method is to choose to download your SlideShare presentation directly to your computer from the SlideShare website and then upload it to WordPress following the same method described above in “1. Downloadable PowerPoint Presentation from WordPress”. Lastly, within your Microsoft PowerPoint program, you can save your Powerpoint presentation as a PDF and upload the PDF to WordPress (read about how to [cref add-pdf-wordpress add a PDF to WordPress])

As you can see, there are many options for allowing your WordPress website visitors access to your PowerPoint presentations. Whether you are providing visitors your original PowerPoint file to download or a SlideShare converted presentation to view online, there is a solution available for you to add a PowerPoint Presentation to WordPress.

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To insert an image or other type of media into a WordPress post or page within your website, first login to the administration area of WordPress. Next, choose either “Posts” or “Pages” from the left navigation menu. For this example, we’ll assume you are writing a new post and adding an image, but a similar procedure will apply if you are adding a page and/or other type of media.

Wordpress Add a Post

Next choose “Add New” under the “Post” menu. Begin writing your post and once you get to the area where you’d like to add your image or other media, place your cursor in that position. To add an image, click on the “square” icon next to the “Upload/Insert” text above the text formatting tool bar.

WordPress Add Media Toolbar

After you’ve clicked on the add image icon, a separate window will pop up prompting you to upload a file. There are two version of the file uploader, a Flash based version and a regular browser version. Please click on “Browser uploader” to choose a file to upload to your website and post. You many also use the default Flash uploader, but it doesn’t work properly on certain system configurations. The surer bet is to use the “Browser uploader”.

WordPress Browser Uploader Option

You’ll now be presented with the option to upload a file from your computer. You will also have the option to upload a file from another website (URL), your stored Media Library within your WordPress website, and other upload options depending on which plugins you have installed in WordPress. To upload an image from your computer simply click the upload button and navigate to the file you’ve chosen and click “upload”.

Once you’ve successfully uploaded your file, a new screen will appear with options for formatting your image.

Title: The name of your image file in WordPress. You can change this to any name you like.
Caption: You may leave this blank, however it is always a good idea to add a simple caption to all your images. Not only does it help describe your image to a user viewing your post, it’s also read by search engines. The caption and file name are usually the only information the search engine has to determine what your image really is. A search engine can’t view an image like a human can and make a judgment as to what the image depicts.
Description: You may add a longer description to your image if you prefer, providing addtional information to your users and search engines.
Link URL: If you’d like for your image to be linked to somewhere on the web or on your website, you can add a hyperlink to it here.
Alignment: Where you’d like your image to appear in your post. Choosing none will usually left align your image and not wrap your text around the image. The images in this post are set to align none. If you want to position your text otherwise and have your text wrap around your image, choose one of the other alignment options.
Size: You can either use the actual size of your image or instruct WordPress to reduce the image size.

Now that you’ve added an image to your post you can preview how it will actually look when you publish it to your website by clicking on the “Preview” button on the right side of your screen. If the image is formatted correctly and your post looks the way you want it, you’ve just successfully added an image to your WordPress post!

If your image and post don’t appear properly or you want to adjust it’s appearance, you can click on the image within your post and you’ll see two buttons pop up over the image. Clicking on the first “picture” button will bring you to an image properties page. Here you can make additional adjustments to you image. If you want to start over with a new image or delete the image, click on the “delete” button.

WordPress Edit an Image

Another difference is posts can have categories and tags associated with each entry.

Categories are the general subject or topic that a post is classified within. They are useful for organizing your blog content and allowing your visitors to browse certain categories to view posts of similar subject matter. It’s good practice to keep the number of main categories under ten as to not overwhelm your site visitors with too many choices. You can also add subcategories to your main categories if needed.

Tags are similar to the Meta tags of a website page. They also give you more fine grain control over how you classify your posts. When someone searches using specific keywords, they will locate your post by not only it’s title, but the tags you’ve added to describe your post’s content. Drawing upon an analogy to scientific classification in biology, Categories can be thought of as “Class” (i.e mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, arthropods) whereas Tags are like “Species” (i.e fox, deer, bear, desert kit fox, western mule deer, alaskan polar bear).

To get started adding a new post, log in to the Admin area of WordPress and click on “Posts” in the left navigation. In the expanded “Posts” area in the navigation, click on “Add New”.

Wordpress Add a Post

Now you’re ready to begin writing your new post for your website. The first step is to enter a post title. Once you’ve finished adding a title, click in the text editor area below the text formatting toolbar where you’ll be writing the body of your post. A new URL for your post will be dynamically created for you by WordPress, based on what you entered for your post’s title, and will appear next to “Permalink” below title text box.

Clicking on the “Edit” button will allow you to change the default URL WordPress created. If you have a long post title, you’ll want to change the default URL to shorter name, optimally one to four words separated by dashes. When deciding on your post URL name, be mindful of the keywords potential visitors will enter in search engines to find your post. For example, if your post is titled, “Add a Post to your WordPress Website”, by default WordPress will give your post a URL similar to http://www.your-website.com/index.php/2009/01/add-a-post-to-your-wordpress-website. First you’ll want to strip out the frivolous words that aren’t relevant to a keyword search for your article. In our example we’ll drop “a”, “to”, and “your”. We’re left with “add post wordpress website”. All things being equal, this could be an acceptable URL. But I have a bit of extra personal knowledge on the subject of my post and I’ve also done some keyword research to see what my potential audience is searching for. I know the majority of my target readers are WordPress users who aren’t adding the word “website” to their searches for WordPress articles. I also know that every search for WordPress content has the keyword “wordpress” in the search. Therefore, I’m going to place the keyword “wordpress” as the first word in my URL, because the first word is weighted more heavily by most search engines, followed by “add” and post”. The URL I’ve chosen for my post titled “Add a Post to your WordPress Website” is http://www … wordpress-add-post.

After you’re finished with your post title and URL permalink, you can begin to add content to the page in the text editor area below the formatting toolbar. You may either use the standard “Visual” text editor tools to write and format your text, images, and media or the “HTML” editor if you feel more comfortable using HTML code (learn how to [cref insert-image-wordpress-post add an image to your page]).

Most WordPress installations are set to automatically save a draft of your work when writing a post, but it is a good idea to manually save your work every so often, especially if you’ve been working on it for an extended period. You’ll find the “Save Draft” button in the publish pane on the right side of the page. This is also important if you want to stop work and pick up again later.

WordPress Save Draft

Once you’re finished creating your page, its time to add your post category(s) and tag(s). On the right side of the page in the “Tags” pane, enter the tag names you think best describe your post. You can either use your knowledge of the post topic you’re writing about or perform keyword research to determine the best tags to associate with your post. If you’ve already entered tags for other posts, you can click on the “Choose from the most popular tags” link to bring up a list of your most popular previously used tags.

WordPress Categories & Tags

Adding a category(s) to your post is very similar to adding a tag. You can either create a new category or add an existing one. You may choose to classify your post under one or more categories. If you want to manage your categories, open the category editor by clicking on “Posts” in the left navigation and then “Categories”.

At this point you are just about ready to publish your post to your WordPress blog. In the “Publish” pane above the “Tags” pane, you’ll notice a few options.

Status: This shows whether the post is currently published to your blog, still a draft, or pending review.

Visibility: By clicking on the “edit” link, you’ll see a few options appear. Normally you’ll want to keep the visibility setting on “Public” so all visitors to your website and blog have permission to view your post. However, you occasionally may want to password protect a post. By choosing this option, WordPress will prompt you to create a unique password for your post. The post link will be visible in your blog area, but when a visitor tries to view the page, they will be required to enter your password. This can be a useful feature to quickly protect a post, but for a more comprehensive website wide solution, WordPress plugins exist that present a better option, such as Role Management for WordPress. The final option is “Private”. Making a post private will hide it from appearing in your blog unless you are logged in. A user will also not be able to access it by search or by directly entering the post URL in their browser unless logged in.

Publish: The “Publish” setting directly below “Visibility”, controls when your post will be published to your blog. If you leave this unchanged and click on the publish button, your post will be published immediately which is normally what you’ll choose. There may be instances where you don’t want to publish your post right away, but at some time in the future. By changing the date and time, you can schedule WordPress to automatically publish your post to your blog whenever you want.

WordPress Publish Pane

Before you publish your post it’s a good idea to see how it will actually appear within your website and blog after it’s published. Click on the “Preview” button in the “Publish” pane to see a preview of your post. After you’ve made any necessary adjustments to your post and you’re ready to make it live in your blog, click on the “Publish” button. If your post or any of your images and test formatting aren’t appearing properly, you can always edit the post as many times as needed and re-publish.