Creating your first post

For this chapter and the next few chapters, we'll be focusing on the use of WordPress to run a blog website. In a later chapter, we'll talk more specifically about using WordPress for a non-blog website.

Therefore, with that in mind, let's add the first piece of content to your new blog, a blog post. (This won't be the very first post on the blog itself because WordPress created a post, a comment, and a page for you when it installed. Nevertheless, it will be your first post.) To create a post, just click on New | Post in the top bar. You'll be taken to the following page:

As you can see, there are a lot of options for your post (which we'll explore in more detail in Chapter 3, Creating Blog Content). For now, let's just worry about the basics. Every post should have, at a minimum, a title, and some content. Therefore, go ahead and type in some text in those two fields (the title field and the big content field). When you are happy with it, click on the Publish button.

You'll get a green label note informing you that the post has been published. Take a look at the front page of your site by clicking on the name of your site in the top bar. You'll see the following:

Notice that we are using the default Twenty Seventeen theme. If you're using a different one, then the design and the layout of your first post will be different.