How to use this Page

Last week, we announced a few updates to the WordPress.com interface, including faster stats and enhanced site management on both desktop and mobile devices.

Our push to make all WordPress.com sites faster and easier to access and manage continues. This week, we’re thrilled to unveil a few brand-new features that allow bloggers, publishers, and business owners to run their sites and manage their content from one central hub, no matter what device they’re using.

From new blog post and page management tools to Jetpack site integrations, we hope you enjoy the latest additions as much as we do!

Centralized post management

You can now access all your posts from one convenient location, whether you write one personal blog or publish on multiple sites. Quickly sort through published, scheduled, drafted, or even trashed posts for one or all of your sites at once!

A visual preview of each blog post lets you scan your content to edit, view, publish, or trash from a single list. Another new functionality we’re excited to introduce today: while “Blog Posts” is selected, you can hop to another blog’s post list using the site selector in the sidebar.

Easy access to pages

For many site administrators, managing pages is just as — if not more — important than post management, so we’ve extended to pages the same functionality that lets you review all your posts from one place.

You can look up any of your pages, and then publish, un-publish, or trash them, all directly from your WordPress.com dashboard. Editing pages is also just one click away, regardless of the number of sites you run.

One WordPress dashboard for all your sites

We also have great news for those of you who have both self-hosted WordPress sites and WordPress.com sites. The new WordPress dashboard gives you access to all your Jetpack-connected sites as well as to sites hosted here on WordPress.com, and allows you to manage your posts, pages, and plugins from the same central hub.

Tell us what you think!

For some, individual-site management in the classic WP Admin dashboard will continue to be the go-to. That said, today’s updates include some entirely new features that are only accessible in the new dashboard. To tap into multi-site posts and pages lists and manage all your WordPress sites under one hood, we encourage you to try out the new interface.

We want to thank all of you who’ve shared constructive feedback with us — it helps us immensely in our effort to make the experience even smoother. Whichever dashboard you fancy, we hope you’ll take the updates for a spin and continue to share your thoughts with us!

Last week, we announced a few updates to the WordPress.com interface, including faster stats and enhanced site management on both desktop and mobile devices.

Our push to make all WordPress.com sites faster and easier to access and manage continues. This week, we’re thrilled to unveil a few brand-new features that allow bloggers, publishers, and business owners to run their sites and manage their content from one central hub, no matter what device they’re using.

From new blog post and page management tools to Jetpack site integrations, we hope you enjoy the latest additions as much as we do!

Centralized post management

You can now access all your posts from one convenient location, whether you write one personal blog or publish on multiple sites. Quickly sort through published, scheduled, drafted, or even trashed posts for one or all of your sites at once!

A visual preview of each blog post lets you scan your content to edit, view, publish, or trash from a single list. Another new functionality we’re excited to introduce today: while “Blog Posts” is selected, you can hop to another blog’s post list using the site selector in the sidebar.

Easy access to pages

For many site administrators, managing pages is just as — if not more — important than post management, so we’ve extended to pages the same functionality that lets you review all your posts from one place.

You can look up any of your pages, and then publish, un-publish, or trash them, all directly from your WordPress.com dashboard. Editing pages is also just one click away, regardless of the number of sites you run.

One WordPress dashboard for all your sites

We also have great news for those of you who have both self-hosted WordPress sites and WordPress.com sites. The new WordPress dashboard gives you access to all your Jetpack-connected sites as well as to sites hosted here on WordPress.com, and allows you to manage your posts, pages, and plugins from the same central hub.

Tell us what you think!

For some, individual-site management in the classic WP Admin dashboard will continue to be the go-to. That said, today’s updates include some entirely new features that are only accessible in the new dashboard. To tap into multi-site posts and pages lists and manage all your WordPress sites under one hood, we encourage you to try out the new interface.

We want to thank all of you who’ve shared constructive feedback with us — it helps us immensely in our effort to make the experience even smoother. Whichever dashboard you fancy, we hope you’ll take the updates for a spin and continue to share your thoughts with us!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Abayomi, the Brazilian Puma

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 21, 2014.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

This month-long series of blog posts will explain author websites and offer tips and writing strategies for an effective author website. It alternates between a day of technical information and a day of writing content. By the end of the month, you should have a basic author website up and functioning. The Table of Contents lists the topics, but individual posts will not go live until the date listed. The Author Website Resource Page offers links to tools, services, software and more.

Transferring Pages to WordPress

This is an exciting day. So far, you’ve written pages for ABOUT, BOOKS, NEWS, CONTACT, and PRIVACY. It’s time to get them on the site. Remember that WordPress is a Content Management System and uses two types of content, pages and posts. Posts are organized in reverse chronological order for the blog; Pages are static pages that don’t change and operate much like a website.

WordPress has extensive documentation on how to use the software in the WordPress Codex. Believe me, the Codex is your friend. Any questions, go there first.

Here are Codex instructions on:
How to Write a Post.
How to Write a page.

Remember, we’ve asked search engines not to index the site yet, so there won’t be any traffic until we change that setting. You can’t break the software. It’s time to add your Pages to your site.

Click on Pages/AddNew. Cut and paste your pages into the editor and tweak until it looks right. This will take some time, so keep at it until you’ve got the basic Pages done. Then, add one more Page: Label this one, BLOG, and leave it empty with no content. Then, you’ll have a couple tasks to do.

Set Home Page on Settings. First, you’ll want to set the HOME Page. Go to Settings/Reading. The default is for your latest post (blog post) to be the front page of your site. You can still leave it that way, if you like, but if you wrote a great HOME page, you’ll want to select it.

Set your HOME Page and your BLOG page. Click to enlarge.

Now, when you look at your website (FamousAuthorWebsite.com), you should see your home page.

MENU:Navigating Around Your Site

Great. But how do you get to the Pages? To do that, you must set up a custom Menu that will let your readers navigate through the site. Go to Appearance/Menus. Because themes operate differently in how they use a menu, you may have to read the documentation for your theme or search for a tutorial for your theme + menu. Here is WordPress’s basic instructions on menus. And here’s a video about WordPress menus.

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If you can’t see this video, click here.

Note that you can create various menus and use Widgets to add a custom menu where you want. On my HOME Page and on the sidebar of Fiction Notes, I use a Custom Menu in a Widget to add navigation entitled, “NEW? START HERE.” It links to other series of posts that are pillars of the site. When and where would you use a Custom Menu? Maybe for your books?

The fourth session of my new course, Publish and Sell Your E-Books, started last week. I love teaching it and have had the most interesting questions in my discussion areas–in fact, one of my students commented that she learned as much in the discussions as in the lessons. I was pleased! Indeed, the ability to ask questions and get answers is the key advantage to learning in an online classroom. Otherwise, you could research everything you needed to know from a book or the Internet. A number of students have asked how to format pages for an e-book and if they can put in page breaks. This question has made me realize that one of the tough things about going from publishing “regular” books to e-books is the idea that “pages” no longer exist. An e-book is all just lines of text that display on the screen of the e-reader. The e-reader is what determines the size or dimensions of the viewing screen (digital page), plus the font display size the user selects (I love e-readers because I can make the font very large). So, e-book authors need to imagine all those lines of text displayed on anything from a [...]

That's right, as of this morning there are not one, not two, not three or even four, but forty-two pages of "Forts: Fathers and Sons" available for you to read online!

Get this...

It's totally free!

Don't say I never gave you anything.

Why not click the link below and take a look? What have you got to lose? Nothing.

Or did you already forget that I said it was free?

Damn you and your short memory.

Steve