WordPress is universally loved because (among other things) it makes writing and publishing articles very simple; so simple, in fact, that anyone who uses a keyboard and is capable of typing a portion of text can make it look neat and decent. But for the article to be truly great, it must meet these two terms: that you know how to write and master both language and style and, on the other hand, article must be formatted so that it pleases the eye.

So, what does that mean?

Unformatted article, no matter how well-written, can be boring, unreadable and certainly not good-looking.

Can you spot the difference between these two articles?

Whatever the method you choose, these advice will help you pick an excellent website domain wisely:

• Make it memorable. A short name that is easily remembered will help people memorize, adopt and tell others about the existence of website. This is cited in numerous research as a vital part of direct internet traffic – when people type in the url of your website directly, not reaching it via search engines or social networks.
• Make it easy to type in. Owners of Fiverr got fed up with people typing in the website name erroneously, so they got a Fiver domain, too. 🙂

Whatever the method you choose, these advice will help you pick an excellent website domain wisely:Make it memorable. A short name that is easily remembered will help people memorize, adopt and tell others about the existence of website. This is cited in numerous research as a vital part of direct internet traffic – when people type in the url of your website directly, not reaching it via search engines or social networks. Make it easy to type in. Owners of Fiverr got fed up with people typing in the website name erroneously, so they got a Fiver domain, too. 🙂

First off, the visual editor space has two parts – “visual”, where we type (or paste from somewhere) the piece of text itself, and “text” where the same article is translated into a suitable html code – so, if you are familiar with the basis of coding, text can be edited formatted and enriched in that way, with no plugins and addons whatsoever.

Do you see all the options of visual editor?

Yet, still, many users, particularly beginners, complain that their editor lacks options. What is often the case in fact is that – they do not see all the options!

In the upper right corner of visual editor is a button kitchen sink – by clicking it, you will open a whole row of extra buttons giving you way more options for formatting an article, alignment, underlining, the color of text, but also an option to copy and paste a “clean”, unformatted text from some other editor, e.g. Word.

TIP: if you copy a text into a WP editor, make sure you use this button (a little table with letter “T”). If you paste the text directly into the editor it will keep the old formatting settings and you’ll go through a lot of trouble to make the article look just as you want it to be.

Basic formatting – bold, italics, strikethrough, underline

These formatting options are basically identical to those in Word. You can make text bold, make it italic, strikethrough, underlined. The good news is that during writing in WP editor, instead of clicking a certain button, you may use keyboard shortcuts for specific actions. To highlight certain areas of the article, feel free to bold key phrases (never the entire paragraphs), but go a bit easier on italic, as well as strikethrough. In this WordPress version, underline option is located in second row, next to paragraph option.

Paragraph

To make page look nicer than it is and to enhance titles and subtitles, use the paragraph option – it makes you able to control the text size.

List and quote formatting

Lists are my personal favourite way of making the article interesting as they make it much more visually appealing. They are ideal for when you need to enumerate stuff, they lend some much needed “whiteness” to the text and they are pretty much obligatory in every article you create. You’ve got all the options, unregulated and numerated lists – the former has dots, the latter ordinal numbers.

This is where they dwell within the editor:

The quotes can also be used frequently, whenever you need to use someone’s statement, or simply just to find another way to highlight certain places in article. This part will certainly differ from the rest of the article, but just how…well, it often depends on the settings of WordPress theme you are using.

Link/remove link buttons

These buttons are among the key ones. On internet, when you write about a certain subject and not link it, it’s like you haven’t said anything. Linking is very simple and it is recommended to place the link on a keyword or a phrase – for instance:

how to write a well-formatted article and not look how to format an article here.

Text alignment options are often used by some people, some other very rarely. I belong in this second group for I consider that most website and blog themes do not demand this sort of alignment. The color change option is another thing I seldom use and I advice you to use it with caution. You don’t want your article to end up looking like a child’s drawing.

One extremely useful thing to me are the keyboard shortcuts that you rich by clicking the question mark:

A highly useful little thing, especially if you don’t know these by heart.

Photographs

With no images, your article will look bland and poor. The option located just above the main “sink”, Add Media, makes it possible to insert images or any other media type into the article. The ways of manipulating these photos are changed with every WordPress update. Some of these changes are not according to my taste, but I believe them to be adjusted to majority of users’ needs.

And if all this is not enough?

WordPress has a solid base of various plugins and addons for visual enrichment of articles, the most popular of all being TinyMCE advanced. It contains a huge amount of extra functions and features that you can implement into your WordPress editor, by the “drag and drop” method – so you can customize the “sink” by putting your most frequently used option buttons in the front row.

Also, I gladly use addons for shortcodes (at the moment it’s the Shortcode ultimate that grabs my interest) because with their help I can emphasize additionally areas of text – this is a very cool thing to have for call to action phrases or various other buttons, because you can make them eye-appealing with no coding at all, simply via addons.