Formatting Your Posts and Pages

When writing for the Web, part of the job of the writer is to make sure that the Web page or the blog post is properly formatted. It's not only a courtesy to your reader to format your text correctly, it makes you look like an idiot when your posts lack standard paragraph breaks, properly inserted and aligned images, and correctly formatted links. It's not rocket science, either, since most writers are using a blogging or content management system to create their posts. You do need to remember to check your posts after you publish them. To make changes or corrections, you'll need to be logged in, and then you'll need to be sure you're looking at the full version of the specific post you want to edit.

One of the simplest problems to correct are paragraphs with extra white space between them. Just delete the extra space. You can do this by either editing the raw HTML, or using the WYSIWYG editing options, selecting the empty space and deleting it.

Frequently people simply copy and paste a Web site address or URL, rather than using the edit tool to properly format the link so that the post contains clickable text. Once you've copied the URL from your Web browser so that it is on your "clipboard," simply select the text you want to turn into a link, and click the edit icon that looks like a link of change; paste your URL into the proper address field in the pop-up form, instead of leaving an unsightly link that looks like this:

http://www.apple.com/iphone

Not only does an unformatted URL look ugly, it can confuse your readers, and it makes posts look like spam to the little search engine bots that index the Web.

Always double check your title—is it spelled correctly? Not only do we look particularly foolish when we misspell a title, it affects how the post is indexed since the search engine bots use post title and Web page titles as part of the information they show users. If you've written a brilliant post about orgasm, and spelled it orgams in your title, neither Google or anyone else are likely to see your post when they use a search engine. Too many misspelled words, and some search engines will assume you're writing spam.

The option to use the title you give an image when you upload it as the image caption is an option; you can edit it, or delete it completely. If it's a long caption, you might be better off simply deleting it, since an overly long caption can destroy the proper wrapping of the body text around the image.