Writing a Blog with Elementor
Okay, so you’ve set up your website. You built your blog archive page with Elementor. You designed you template. Now you want to start blogging posting and sharing.. So how do you do it? What are best practices.. Read on and we will guide you through the process.
Getting Started
Use the side menu on the left in your WordPress dashboard. Click on Posts > Add New. Yes, it’s that easy. See image below.
Once you click Add New, your new post will open up on the WordPress dashboard. Most people use this interface to post their articles. But we can do better. We want to post in a live format.
Although we won’t be using the WP interface, we do need to take care of a few things before we open up Elementor.
Add Page Title
It seems arbitrary, but these steps on the backend are important. Your title serves as a headline for Google search robots. Make sure your title is relevant to your topic. See image below for where you will add your page title.
Set Meta Data
Meta data is data that describes other data. The meta data on your blog post tells users what your post is about.. And more importantly, tells Google bots what your page is about.
The first step is to declare a key phrase and type it into the text box in Yoast (red arrow in image below). Your key phrase should be what people would type in a search engine if they wanted to find your post. If your blogging about a new chicken sandwich, your key phrase should be “chicken sandwich” or “best chicken sandwich recipe”.
Then you want to make sure your snippet is completed. The snippet (green arrow) is a sneak peek of your blog post. If you are just a blogger with no business, this could be a brief description of your post. However, if you are a business, I recommend using you business tagline on all pages. If you had a good web developer this would automatically populate for every post.
Another portion of the snippet ins the snippet title. You can use your page title, edit this dynamically, or customize it completely. At hour23design, we have a standard template for snippet titles.
Page Subject | Company Name | Industry | Location
Featured Image
If you set it up, this is your main image on the page. It’s at the top and serves as the “feature” to the article. Make sure it is relative to the topic and most importantly make sure the image has alternative text for page readers. You can set the alt text once you select your image. your alt text should be descriptive of the article subject matter. See this article for the importance of alt text.
When you click “Set Featured Image”, you will be served a popup with all of the images you uploaded into your media library. You can use one of these or upload a new image. The red arrow points to the options for selecting an image. Make sure you add ALT TEXT!
Elementor
Once you have completed the steps above you need to save your progress as a draft (red arrow on image below).
Then it’s time to edit into the Elementor live environment. Click the blue button noted by the green arrow and let’s begin.
Once you enter the live environment, you will see segments of you page that are already in place. Your featured image, author info, page title and all of your other presets from your blog post template..
You can see in red the featured image and other info is already set.
The green arrow shows you were to begin. Click on the pinkish-red plus sign button to add a new section.
This will bring up the section structure selection. You can set this up however you want. You can have one column, two or six. Remember, you can add as many sections as you want..
Now we write!
Once you’ve set up your structure, it’s time to start writing.
One the left side menu, click the nine pebble link to bring up the elements you can add. You can choose a Heading, text, image, list, whatever you need to make sure blog post fit your needs. Simply drag the selected element into the newly created section.
Once you element is in place you can edit the element with the same menu by selecting the blue pencil icon on in the upper right corner of the elements blue container box (red arrow).
Once you’ve completed a good portion of your article, you may want to preview and see how it looks. The green arrow points to an eyeball icon to the left of the green publish button. Click this to preview your blog post in a new window. Leave the preview open, and it will dynamically update every time you save a change.
And finally, once you are ready, click the green publish button.. Once you do that, your blog is live. You can still edit and change anything you want, but it is now visible on your site. I typically just click publish in the backend and in Elementor as soon as I start. Especially if I know I will finish the post in one sitting.
If you want to share your blog on your social platforms, click the template provided social share buttons and share away.
In conclusion
This is our preferred way to post blog articles in WordPress. It is dynamic, you can preview you work immediately and you have unlimited style control. Once you get familiar with Elementor’s interface, you will agree that this is far superior to originating an article on the WordPress dashboard.
Look, you aren’t designing rockets to orbit the moon. Mess around with different elements, positioning and styling. There is nothing you can’t fix later. And of course, if you need help with WordPress or Elementor, contact us today. We would be glad to provide assistance.
