Member Articles

In my first authors guide to working on IMPress using our WordPress blog engine, I went over many of the basics.  As we continue to add new plug-ins that offer more features it became clear that a more advanced guide would be necessary.  The second article for those that have gotten past the beginners stage included many tips and tricks using the formatting menu and covered some of the most common errors our staff members were making when posting their articles and images.

Now we have come to the third article in this series that will take you even one step further. My hope is that everyone that follows my guides will not only have better results publishing on IMPress but will also gain a keen knowledge of working with a WordPress blog.  That in itself is worthwhile since they have become so popular and many individuals that would like to build their own website, might decide as we did to try the wonderful WordPress blog.

Additional Ways To Generate More Reads

Tags

All of use already know about tags.  After we enter or check the Categories, we then go and add our Tags to the article.  Normally tags are used to make it easy for search engines to find out articles based on these tags, but we have an added advantage and those tags will appear on the top of our articles in red.  If you click on one of those tags it will search our site for all the articles using that tag.  So we can search for all the “Photography” articles either clicking on a tag or clicking on a Category.  There are a number of ways to locate articles on our site so tagging is important to make your articles easy to find.  You can even use your name as a Tag in your articles and you can then find all of your articles by clicking on that tag.

Excerpts

Excerpts is an important item when publishing your article. Here is a link to WordPress and their full explanation.

Here is a brief description but read the entire page on the WordPress site, it will detail exactly how to use it properly.

The WordPress Excerpt is an optional summary or description of a post; in short, a post summary.

The Excerpt has two main uses:

1. It replaces the full content in RSS feeds when the option to display summaries is selected in Dashboard › Settings › Reading.
2. Depending on the WordPress theme, it can be displayed in places where quick summaries are preferable to full content:
   • Search results
   • Tag archives
   • Category archives
   • Monthly archives
   • Author archives

I have discovered that these are vital in order to get readers to actually click on the link to an article in a search engine.  So if a search result simply shows the title or picks up a couple of lines from your article, it is not as effective as your own description of the article.  You want people to be compelled to click on those links, either in a search result or a search on our site.  If you feel comfortable working with code, there is further information on the WordPress site.

Here is how one of our articles without the manual excerpt appears on Google. You can see Google will simply pick out the first couple of sentences and use that, or you can write a more compelling excerpt which they will use instead of the auto one.

WordPress 3.5 Upgrade Features

With the latest upgrade to our IMPress site, we have some new and easy to use features that will help you format your articles even better then before.  Would you like to format your article with two columns of text instead of one?  How about three columns, or event four.  You can now do this in an easy way with the new Column Shortcodes.

Here is a description of how they work:

Columns Shortcodes:

This option will enable the columns shortcodes usage within the post/page content area.

Usage:

You can use the column shortcodes to insert columns in your post/page content area. Lets say you want to show two columns like you see in a magazine.  How would you do this?  Maybe one column that is wider then the other.  Or possibly three or four columns so you can create a page like this one.

For example: If you’d like to divide your content into two columns you would type:

Using Short Codes on IMPress

Remember to “close” your short code, just as you would with HTML. Also; did you notice the _last code added to the last content column? That’s REALLY important as it will remove the margin on the right side. If you forget it, your columns won’t work.

How about another example?

[two_third]This area is two thirds wide.[/two_third]

You can combine the available sizes any way you’d like, but you must ensure the total width is equal to “1”.

For example, you can have

This all may sound a bit confusing at first, but once you do a couple of them, it becomes easy.  On our new IPA site, doing shortcodes is even easier. Read my article on Shortcodes on the new site, you will be amazed at what you can do with this nice feature. On the new site our theme designer has included 100 shortcodes that can do everything from formatting your columns, to adding images in a column to so much more. Be sure to check it out as well, will help you produce award winning articles that look good too 🙂