[This is part of the Common WordPress Mistakes series to help bloggers, churches, ministries and nonprofits avoid common mistakes when creating a new website using the WordPress CMS.]
As we roll through this series, I am reminded of those silly mistakes made early on. This first one today, copying and pasting from a word processor, is one mistake I never made. Why? Am I that awesome? I wish!
The reason why I avoided this mistake is because I read about!
I hope this does the same for someone else. My little “pay it forward” if you will.
Enjoy!
Common WordPress Mistakes
Here are two quick and simple tips that can keep you from being the ultimate WordPress n00b:
1. Copy/Paste from a Word Processor
Please read this carefully.
I say, copy and paste, not compose. In fact, you should be using a word processor to compose your blog posts. You not only can easily lose a blog post or page while saving it, but the spelling and grammar checks are usually way better than what WordPress can provide (although not half bad).
The reason why shouldn’t copy and paste, is the extra formatting that usually comes with it. I recommend you add your links and setup your heading after you’ve pasted it over. Much of the formatting that carries over will cause havoc in many different ways—from design to any edits you decide to make.
To fully insure you’ve lost all the formatting when pasting your written copy, flip over from the Visual tab to the Text tab in the upper right hand corner:
This is a quick way to make for certain you don’t have any nasty bits.
You can also use this WordPress feature:
The “T” is for plain text while the “W” is, well, you can probably figure that one out. 😉
As a Mac user, I prefer the “right click method”:
As you can see, there are plenty of ways to do this. The point is, the bottom line, make sure you’re pasting clean text into WordPress!
2. Leaving Just Another Tagline and Not Deleting Sample Pages, Posts & Comments
That moment when you realize that you still have “Just another WordPress blog.”
Don’t be that guy.
This is another instance of leaving WordPress’ default features. One of the first things you’ll want to do after setting up your WordPress blogs, is to update your Tagline under your Settings > General:
After you’ve got everything styled and themed just the way you like it, it’s also important to take the time and delete the Sample Page, Hello World blog post (I like to re-write my own for first time websites) and test comment.
It isn’t dire or anything, but it’s like going around with toilet paper stuck to your shoe. I’m just sayin’.
Do you have any common WordPress mistakes to share?
We would love to add them to the series!
See you all in the comments… 😉
Matt R says
One of the things that I’ve run into on my church wordpress site is that I’ll create a post and forget to disable the “allow comments” check box. Is there an easy way to set this as the norm, as our church website really has no need for comments anywhere.
Also what is a “pingback”?
Eric Dye says
Look for the answer to your first question in Part 9 of this series. 😀
As for pingbacks, here is a technical description. You can see pingbacks “in action” just after the comments here. You’ll see that some of these are pingbacks from our own blog—in addition to other blogs.
Does this makes sense, now?
Matt R says
Thanks, that helps!
Eric Dye says
Awesome! 😀