New Bloggers Guide
Welcome to Master Point Press’s New Blogger Tutorial!
Right now, you are probably wondering about a lot of things. Maybe you don’t know how to use WordPress. Maybe you have never blogged before. Maybe you are not even sure what a blog is. Maybe you just wandered in here by mistake (don’t worry, it happens to everyone).
This tutorial series is meant to be a beginners introduction to blogging with MPP and WordPress. In the first installment, you will learn what a blog is, what WordPress is, how to login, how to navigate the dashboard, which boxes do what, and what all the important buttons do. Most importantly, you will learn how to go about publishing a blog entry. This is good to read before starting to write your first post.
In another tutorial, we’ll cover several useful WordPress functions that will make your blogging life easier, such as adding a profile page, using a more advanced level of text editing functions, and how to link to other people’s websites. Read this after you’re sure you know the basics.
A third tutorial will include instructions for unnecessary (but fun and convenient) additions to your blog such as how to schedule a post to go live when you’re on vacation, quick posts, and how to embed completely unrelated videos from YouTube in your blog. This is only to be read when you can describe the layout of the dashboard in your sleep 🙂
Quick Hint: If at any point in this introduction you feel you know everything and want to skip right to blogging, or if you find the overview is too much to absorb and you want to get to the good stuff, simply skip to Page 8.
What is a Blog, anyway?
An excellent question. Wikipedia (an online encyclopedia) defines a blog as both a noun and a verb:
A blog (a contraction of the term “web log”) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
For all intents and purposes, a blog is essentially an on-line journal kept by one or more people, usually about a specific subject. In Bridge Blogging’s case, the subject is Bridge (Bridge hands, Bridge anecdotes, Bridge players, Bridge competitions, etc).
As a vehicle to get your thoughts on this most glorious of games to the masses, Master Point Press is using WordPress, a desktop publishing program that makes it easy to get your writing onto the Internet.
One of the benefits of WordPress is how easy it is to use! It practically does all the work for you. All you’ll have to do, is enter the appropriate information into the appropriate boxes, and press PUBLISH. Kind of like doing your taxes, except the results of WordPress are usually positive. Before you can do any blogging, you’ll have to understand the basic idea of how you can get WordPress to do what you want with the least amount of effort.