Contributor Tip Sheet

Types of Posts
When posting content for WedShare*Daily, keep in mind that you’re writing for a specific audience: the wedding planning community. Your readers are engaged brides- and grooms-to-be in the same place you are, looking for advice, tips, and inspiration for their own planning. Certain types of posts will be better received than others, and in general we are looking for the following:

  • Your research, results, and experiences with vendors and wedding professionals, including online resources
  • Do-it-yourself projects you’re taking on for your wedding. How-to’s and tutorials for DIY projects
  • News and topics of interest to wedding planning in general
  • Lots of pictures! This applies to all posts: imagery captivates, and the more photos you add to your posts, the better

dashboard-menuCreating a Post: Overview
Submitting content to publish consists of entering the content, adding photos, and setting its category and keyword tags. From your administrative dashboard, click the “Posts->Add New” link in the left-column menu, or click the “New Post” button at the top of the page.

When the new post page appears, enter in a title for your post and begin adding content. When adding your content, please do not change the font, font size, or text color from default. We’re trying to keep all posts consistent in style across the entire blog.

You can add photos easily using the Fast Insert section of the interface, just below the editor. The next section goes into more detail on adding photos. You can save the draft as many times as you like before publishing, as well as see a preview of your post. When you’re all set for it to publish, set the categories and keyword tags (see the publishing section below) and click the “Publish” button. That’s all there is to it!

Adding Photos

Tip sheet: upload a photo

Uploading a photo

It’s easy to add multiple photos to your posts, and we highly recommend it: photos really enhance posts, especially for readers looking for visual inspiration. Locate the “Fast Insert” section below the editor, and make sure the “From Computer” tab is selected. Click “Select Files” to browse and upload files from your computer. You can title them and enter in captions for each.

When inserting photos, stick to the “From Computer” tab, which allows you to upload photos, or the “Gallery” tab, which allows you to insert multiple photos you’ve uploaded as a gallery into the post. Avoid the “From URL” tab, which links to photos on other websites. If the other website removes the photo, then your post will have a broken image link. If you want to use a photo from another website, download it from the website and then upload it into your post. Make sure you credit the photo owner as described below.

Tip sheet: insert image

You can edit a photo before or after inserting it into your content

Simply click the “Insert into Post” button to insert the photo into your content at the location of your cursor. You can select the size of the photo and the alignment, too: just make sure the size isn’t much larger than 500, or it won’t fit properly into the blog body. Note that once you’ve inserted a photo, you can always click on it to remove or edit it.

Crediting Photos
When posting photos, credit the owner and location you pulled the photo from. If you’re posting a lot of photos, you can do this in a paragraph at the end of your blog post, or you can do it for each photo using the photo caption and link URL fields when uploading/editing the photo. Include a link to the source as a courtesy. For example: Photo credits: cake designs from A Piece of Cake Bakery, www.pieceofcakebakery.net

Setting the Categories and Keyword TagsTip sheet: categories for your posts
Each post should be placed in the appropriate category(ies) so that readers can find the type of entries they’re looking for easily. Posts can be placed in multiple categories. For example, a post discussing how your bakery and florist collaborated to produce an awesome cake decorated with live flowers could be filed in both the Flowers and the Cakes & Confections categories. In addition, ALL your posts should be filed in the “Soon-to-be-Weds” category. This post, then, would be filed in a total of three categories. You would check the box for each of these categories in the Categories menu, to the right of the editor.

Tip sheet: tags for your postYou should also set one or more tags, or keywords, for your post. Tags are another way of grouping posts with similar topics together. A post highlighting the collaboration between your cake and florist could have the tags “florist” and “cakes”, for example. There are no strict rules to choosing tags; it’s up to you which to apply to your post. Add each tag, comma-separated, in the keywords field to the right of the editor. It’s also easy to click “Choose from the most popular tags” and select tags that have already been used from the list. This also keeps things more standardized.

publish

Publishing Your Post
Once you’ve entered your content, added photos, and set the categories and keywords, you’re ready to publish! The rest of the settings in the post interface can be left as default (see the Twitter section below if you’d like to tweet the post). Just click the “Publish” button in the upper right, and your post will be live immediately.

As you’re working on your post, you may want to save it as a draft and return to continue later. Clicking “Save Draft” will save a draft of your post, available only to you in your dashboard, so you can continue later. Drafts are not published to the blog. You can save as many drafts of a post as you like. In addition, you can use the “Preview” button so see how your post will look on the blog, before you actually publish.

Optional: Publish to Twitter

Add your post to your Twitter account

Add your post to your Twitter account

If you have a Twitter account, you can also have a reference to your posts added to your Twitter stream. At the bottom of the post interface is a “WP To Twitter” section. Enter your tweet in the field provided, and a cli.gs link to your post will be automatically added. The link takes up 21 characters, so you have a total of 119 characters available for the tweet. Uncheck the “Don’t Tweet This Post” box before submitting.

NOTE: In order for the Twitter interaction to work, you must set your Twitter account details in your profile. To do so, click Users->Your Profile from the left menu of your dashboard, and scroll down to the “WP to Twitter User Settings” section.

Set your Twitter account details in your profile

Set your Twitter account details in your profile

Check the first option “your posts tweeted into your Twitter account with no @ reference”, or the second option “your posts tweeted into your Twitter account with an @ reference to the site’s main Twitter account”, depending on how you’d like your tweets to be pushed. The second option will add a @wedshare reference to the tweet. Do not select the third option, which will only tweet into the @wedshare account.

Enter your Twitter username and password, then click “Update Profile”. You’re now ready for your posts to be tweeted as well as published.