1. Log in to WordPress admin.
2. Click Pages or Posts (or another post type that your theme might support like Testimonials, Team, Services etc).
3. Open the page or post you want to link to the PDF from.
4. Click Add Media -> Upload Files -> Select Files.
5. Find the PDF file on your computer’s hard drive and click Ok to upload it.
6. Here’s the less than obvious part: You need to copy onto the clipboard of your computer the URL that points to where the file ended up on your website hosting.
   On newer versions of WordPress it is labelled File URL and there is a button labelled Copy URL to clipboard that you just click.
   
   On older WordPress versions it was labelled URL, and you would use your mouse to select the complete contents of that field and then press Control-C (PC) or Command-C (Mac) on your keyboard to copy the URL onto your clipboard. 
7. This step isn’t obvious either. Do NOT click the Insert into post button at the bottom right. Instead click the X at the top right.
8. Back in the text editor for that page/post, decide whether you are going to enter text that links to the PDF or have an image that links to the PDF.
9. If you choose a text link:
   1. Type in the text you want to make into a link. It might be: Download a PDF of our Services.
   2. Select all of that text with the mouse.
   3. Jump to step 11.
10. If you choose an image link:
    1. Insert an image into the web page and position it as you usually would.
    2. Click the image once.
    3. Proceed to step 11.
11. Click the link control in the text editor. It looks like an intact link of a chain.
12. Use Control-V (PC) or Command-V (Mac) to paste the URL you saved on your clipboard (in step 6) into the box. (If there is already a link URL in that box, you do want to overwrite it.)
13. Click the nearby blue button that has the same symbol as the Return/Enter key on your keyboard.
14. If you want the PDF to open in a separate window:
    1. Click the pencil icon.
    2. Click the gear icon to get more options.
    3. Tick the box that says Open link in a new tab.
    4. Click the blue Update button.
15. Save the page post using the Publish or Update button.

• how many visits are made to your site
• how many visits are more than a few seconds (which helps you identify which are people and which are the “bots” of search engines which are indexing your site)
• how long people spend on your site
• which page they enter your site on
• which page they leave your site from
• how they move through your site
• where they are located in the world
• how big the screen of their computer is (so you can see if most of your visitors are on computers, pads or cell phones)
• how they found your site

If you have a Google Analytics account, here are some tips on how to find and interpret the information Google has tracked. (Note: Some of the images below can be clicked to view larger copies.)

How to Log in to Google Analytics

1. Visit https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=analytics. We recommend you bookmark this page.
2. Enter the email address associated with your analytics account. When we create the account for you, we usually create a special email address, such as analytics@your-domain.com which you will use to access the GA account.
3. Enter the password for your Google Analytics account.
4. After you’ve logged in, click Dashboard under the red Accountheading in Google Analytics’ menu on the left side of the page.

   

5. Then click Analytics. One or more website names with a UA number will display. In the example below, you can see how our GA account lists one website: Usable Web Designs. 
6. Click the website name which you want to see traffic for.
7. You’ll see a screen like the one below. Click the bottom row in the table.
8. When you first log into GA, it takes you to the Overview page and defaults to showing you information for the last 30 days. At the top right corner is a box which shows the dates covered. You can use the downward pointing triangle next to the dates to change the date range you want to see stats for. Below, you’ll see information for our site from August 25 to September 24, 2013.

How Many People Visit your Site and for How Long?

1. By hovering your mouse over any data point in the graph, you can see what date that point refers to. In our chart, you can see that Usable Web Designs had more visits than usual on September 16.
2. The pie chart below the graph shows how many visits were returning visitors (who had been to the site before) and how many are new visitors. Most of our visits this month were new visitors.
3. Some visitors may come more than once. Google does its best to identify visitors (this is not always fully accurate, so take this information with a grain of salt) and has counted 170 visits, made by 148 unique visitors for our site over this one month period.
4. A single visitor may visit more than one page. The Pageviews total shows that over those 170 visits, 298 pages were visited. It even calculates the average number of Pages/Visit for you – in this case 1.75 pages per visit.
5. You’ll see one of the statistics is called Bounce Rate This is the percentage of people who left the website after viewing just one page. Over the past month, 68.24% of visitors viewed only one page before leaving our site. There are multiple reasons why someone might visit just one page. It might mean they found what they wanted right away because they entered the site as the result of a Google (or other search engine) search. Or it might mean they didn’t end up where they expected (e.g. they weren’t looking for the kind of information the site provides). Or it might mean they weren’t sure what to do next once they got to the site. So the bounce rate is best interpreted within the context of the other stats. Later, we’ll discuss how to assess user engagement with the site.
6. Google Analytics also calculates the average duration of a visit. On our site, it was 1 minute and 10 seconds per visit during this period. But that number alone is not very helpful. Again, there are better ways at assessing user engagement, which we’ll cover below.

Where are those People Located and What Technology are they Using?

You’ll want to know where on the planet your visitors are located, so you can assess whether you’re reaching your desired audience.

It’s also often helpful to know which browser most of your visitors use (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari) so you can ensure your website is working well on that browser. Knowing whether they are accessing your site with a large screen, or a mobile phone, lets you assess whether you need to put effort into making a mobile version of your site.

At the bottom of the Overview page, you can click any of the following to see data.

• Language
• Country/Territory
• City
• Browser
• Operating System
• Service Provider
• Screen Resolution

Whenever you click one of these, the table to the right will update with 10 rows of information. If you wish to see more rows, click the view full report link at the bottom right.

As the images below show, during this period, the Usable Web Designs site received visits mostly from Canada, the US, India, and Spain, and the most commonly used browsers were Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer. The most commonly used screen resolution (by far) was 768 x 1024 pixels (which is the smallest typical size for a desktop or laptop monitor).

How Engaged are People with the Website?

This is where it gets interesting, and the data is more valuable. There is a menu to the left of Google Analytics with various sections in it. Up till now, we’ve been on the Overview page in the Audience section. Now we’ll click on Behavior in that section and then Engagement.

We can see that the majority of the visits are less than 10 seconds long. This indicates traffic which consists of either “bots” indexing the site (or spamming/hacking software looking for vulnerabilities), or human visitors who leave pretty much immediately. A total of 26 visits lasted between 1 and 10 minutes during that month, and 3 visits were longer than 10 minutes. If we calculate the pages viewed per visit we can see that visitors who stay between 1 and 10 minutes averaged about 4 pages per visit.

Since bots can be very active, it’s best to just factor out the 0 – 10 second visits mentally, and focus on the other rows in this table. If you’ve got a high number of visits that last over one minute, don’t worry too much about the 0 – 10 second row.

How are People Moving Through the Website?

Now we click on Visitors Flow under the Audience section of the Google Analytics menu. The chart that displays shows us where visitors originate from, which page they visit first, and which pages they typically go to next. For this demonstration, we’ve chosen to view data for a one year period instead of a one month period.

In the image below, we can see the many visitors come from Canada, the US, India, the UK and Hungary. The blue flow lines indicate where they went next, with each green rectangle corresponding to a page of the website. The height of each rectangle corresponds to the number of people who went to that page. A relative (partial) URL labels each page: a single slash means the home page. We can see that 1.09k (1009) visitors started with the home page.

URLs are shortened with … in the middle in order to fit the graph on the page. To see a URL fully spelled out, just hover your mouse over it, as we’ve done below. You can see that 188 visits were made in the past year to the page vector-graphics-vs-bitmapped. Of those, 9 visitors chose to continue to elsewhere in the site and 179 left the site (hopefully because they found the information they were looking for).

Let’s say I’m interested in seeing where people went after they left the Vector Graphics vs Bitmapped page. I can just click on that green box and choose Highlight traffic through here. Turns out most of them went to Contact Us or Our Portfolio or some other less popular pages. When I’m done, I can click the green box and choose Clear highlighting.

There are many, many ways to filter and view the Visitor Flow information, but this should get you started.

How are People Finding the Website?

Here we leave the audience section of the Google Analytics menu and click Traffic Sources, then Sources then All Traffic. Then we scroll down to the tabular information.

The table below shows that 807 visitors found our website through Google and 312 came direct (which means they typed our web address into their browser). The rest followed a link to our site from another site (called a “referral”). Common refering sites included signboom.com and secheltvisitorcentre.com, among others. Most of the referral sites in this list are websites we created for clients, which have a discrete “credit” link at the bottom of the page.

Knowing that much of your site’s traffic is coming to you from a search engine begs the question “what were they searching for when they found the site?”. To find this out, click Search and then Organic in the GA menu on the left side of the page. (If you have been paying Google for Pay per Click listings, you may also want to click Search and then Paid.) Then scroll down to the tabular information.

We can see below that in 486 cases, the search query was not tracked. Other searches that bring people to our site are those concerning usability/user-friendliness of websites. Likely the most beneficial search for us business-wise is “sunshine coast website design”. To see more rows, we can use the drop-down next to the Show rows at the bottom of the page.

Preparing a Report

Sometimes you’ll need to prepare a traffic report for a colleague or a funding agency. These can be easily prepared by taking screenshots of the relevant Google Analytics screens, cropping out the unwanted background, and inserting them into a Word document, along with some text interpreting the stats. Here’s a post on how to take a screenshot on a PC with Windows.

Here are steps for saving a screenshot on a PC.

1. Make sure the web page you are taking a screenshot of is showing on your screen.
2. If there are any windows on your computer that you don’t want us to see, minimize them.
3. On your computer keyboard, hold down the Shift button and then tap the Print Screen/SysRq button (which is usually near the top right of your keyboard.)  This saves an image of your whole screen onto the clipboard.
4. Open up the Paint program that comes with Windows.  You can usually find Paint by clicking Start -> All Programs -> Accessories.
5. In Paint, you’ll need to create a new empty document and then paste the clipboard into it. My version of Paint (which came with Windows 7) looks like the image below.  After I open Paint, it has already created a document the size of the clipboard and I just have to click the icon of a clipboard (labelled Paste) at the top left and the clipboard contents show up in Paint.
6. Then click   (which replaces the File menu item from earlier versions of Paint) and choose Save.  Choose to save the image as a jpg.  Make note of where you’re saving this file.
7. Then email us the jpg file.

If you have an older version of Paint, you may have a File menu item at the top left instead of the little blue button.  In that case, you may need to click File -> New to create a new blank document.  And then use Control-v (hold down the Control key and then tap the “v”) on your keyboard to paste the clipboard contents into Paint.

If you have Photoshop and know how to use it, you an use that instead.

I’ve been asked this question many times by clients. Some are concerned that their hosting company is double-billing them. Others have assumed that the second notice they received was spam and can be ignored. And others are just plain confused about which companies are involved in keeping their website online.

To keep your website online, you need to make ongoing payments for two types of services:

1. Domain Registration
2. Hosting

These services can be paid for monthly, yearly, or once every few years, but most of my clients choose to pay yearly. The two bills often come due at the same time of year – the time when your website was initially launched. It’s important that you pay for both these services in a timely fashion, or you website will be taken offline.

Let’s review these two services so you’ll understand the key role they each play.

Domain Registration

Your web site’s domain is the name people type into their browser to visit your website. For example, ours is digitaldandelion.ca. (The https://www. that goes in front of it is not, strictly speaking, part of the domain name.) You may have several domains that point to the same site. (For example, we also have usablewebdesigns.ca pointing to our site.)

A hierarchy of international organizations coordinate the use of domain names. At the bottom of the hierarchy are the domain registrars. A domain registrar is a company who can reserve a name for you so that you can use it for your web site. You must keep your payments with them up to date or they will put your domain name back on the market for someone else to buy. Your web site’s domain name is an important part of your branding; it’s your online address, where customers know they can find you. So this is one bill you don’t want to be late on.

You also want to be sure that that the email address you give the domain registrar for your contact address is one that you will have for a long time. I recommend using something like an @gmail.com address instead of an email provided by your Internet Service Provider (ISP), since you may end up changing ISP in the future and losing any email addresses they gave you.

Scam alert! However, you do need to watch for scams. Over the years we’ve received official-looking emails and paper scam letters for domain renewals. Some of them ask for as much as $500! You should make a record of the companies you have your domain registration and hosting accounts with and the time of year they come up for renewal and the yearly cost. A typical cost for domain registration is between $10 and $20 per year (not per month).

I usually order .ca domains from WHC.ca and other domains (.com, .net, .org, etc) from ICDSoft.com. Many of my clients come to me with domains they’ve ordered from GoDaddy.

Paying to register a domain just gives you the right to use that domain. It does not give you place to put your website where people can see it. That’s where the hosting comes in.

Hosting

In day-to-day language, a “host” is someone who invites you into their home or business. They allow you to make use of their physical space. In the web world, a host is a company that lets your web site live on their disk space and lets visitors access that website from their computer.

When you pay for hosting, you are paying a company to keep a copy of your website on their server and to let you set up email accounts on that server (if you wish) and to keep copies of the emails you send and receive. It is their job to keep the computer operating and connected to the internet 24/7. You’ll want a company that has a good reputation for uptime and customer support. You definitely want a company that is big enough to have support staff available 24/7 in case there are hosting issues during the night or the weekend.

I currently recommend ICDSoft.com for those who want hosting in the US. I recommend WHC.ca for those who want their website hosted on Canadian soil and thus subject to Canadian privacy laws. (If you have determined that you need a Virtual Private Server instead of the usual shared hosting, then I recommend ICDSoft.com for that. WHC.ca offers VPS, but their support for VPS is not up to the level of their support for shared hosting.)

When you consider all that they do for you, hosting prices are a steal. There are reputable companies who will host your website for as little as $6 to $13 a month. Add in the cost of domain registration and you’re looking at less than $200 per year to keep your website online. Compare that to the price of putting a single business-card-sized ad in your local newspaper for just a week. Web sites are a bargain!

If you don’t pay your hosting on time, your host company will likely give you a warning or two and then take your site offline. If you’ve made a backup of the site (you do backup your site, right?), then you’ll need to repurchase the hosting, and possibly reinstall the site (unless they’ve kept a copy handy for you).

Combined Hosting and Domain Registration

Many companies offer both hosting and domain registration, so you can have both under one account with one bill a year.

What Not to Do

Avoid passwords such as ‘password’, ‘secret’ with a single number added, or those that use your name, business name, or a family member’s or pet’s name. With social media so popular these days, a hacker can usually find information about your family online, making it easier for them to guess your password.

Avoid choosing an obvious word and then adding the year to create a pasword. I see many users doing this. For example, let’s say they are creating a password for a library, they might choose library2007 as the password. Hackers are probably familiar with this common approach and would have written code that tries guessing passwords like this.

So how can we choose a secure password that we can actually remember?

What To Do

We’ve all seen the recommendations: include an upper and lower case letter in your password, and a number. Some web sites force you to include a punctuation character in your password as well.

A great way to create a password is to think of a phrase and turn the initials or words into a password. To incorporate the number, you might choose to change any letter o’s into zeroes and letter L’s into ones.

For example, if you ran a pet store, you might think of the phrase ‘I sell cat food’ and then change it to Ise11catfood (where the two L’s are changed to 1’s). Or it could be Isellcatf00d (where the two o’s are changed to zeroes.) Then it is easy for you to remember, but hard for people to guess. To add punctuation, you could put the whole password in brackets e.g. [Isellcatf00d] or add an exclamation mark e.g. Isellcatf00d!

Update: 2015

Unfortunately, hacking software has learned this technique of replacing letters with numbers as well, and it is now recommended that you include deliberate misspellings in your passwords.  So you might use Ise1Katf000d.

Here’s a useful 3 minute video about passwords that you may find enlightening.

This scenario  is especially common with non-profit organizations where there is relatively high turnover in volunteers and board members, and the email address on file with the account is no longer accessible by organization members. If you were to bring in a new web developer today, would you have the information handy that they need to get started on your site?

At best, not having this information can cost you unnecessary expense. At worst, it can lose you control of your domain.  That can happen if the domain expires (perhaps because you couldn’t log in to update your expired credit card information) and then someone else grabs the domain.

You should know the account information for the following:

• All your domain names. These may have been purchased from the same company you purchased your hosting from or from a separate company.  If you have more than one domain they may have been purchased all on one account or under separate accounts.
• Hosting for your web site(s). If you have more than one website, they may share hosting or they may have separate hosting.
• If you use a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla or a shopping cart, you should know the administrative account information for that CMS.

Here’s what you need to keep track of for each account.

1. The URL that you log in at. It’s not much use having a username and password if you don’t know where to use them.
2. The username. This may be your email address, but don’t count on that. It’s best to record the username for every account.
3. The password. For security reasons you shouldn’t be using the same password for every account. So you’ll want to track your passwords.

Don’t rely on your computer to remember your passwords! A number of times I’ve had clients tell me that their laptop failed and they have no other record of their account information.

Sometimes your web designer or graphic designer will ask you for the “source file” for your logo, a brochure or another graphic, so that they have a high-quality graphic to use as the basis for a design.

If the item is a photograph, the designer will want the file that came directly out of your camera (as opposed to one that has been made smaller for the purposes of putting on a website or emailing). Depending on the camera, the source photograph is likely to be in either .jpg, .jpeg or .tif format.

If the item is a graphic design, the designer may request a source file; by this we mean the file that the graphic was originally created with. Graphics are often created with one of the Adobe suite of applications, such as Illustrator, Photoshop or InDesign. The file extensions of these applications are:
Adobe Illustrator: .ai
Photoshop: .psd
InDesign: .ind

Sometimes your designer will ask you for a vector graphic file. Vector graphics files are usually in one of three formats:

• Adobe Illustrator: .ai
• Encapsulated Postscript: .eps
• Scalable Vector Graphic: .svg
• Portable Document Format: .pdf
  However, just because a document is in PDF format, doesn’t mean that it contains your graphics as vector drawings, because PDF files can contain both vector and bitmapped graphics. Here’s the difference.

Bitmapped Graphics

A bitmapped graphic is made up of lots of little rectangles (known as pixels) of solid colours. You may not notice those rectangles when the image is displayed at its intended size, but if you zoom in on a bitmapped image, you can start to see the rectangles. In the example below, the first picture is shown at its desired size, while the second picture is zoomed.

All photographs taken by digital cameras and files created using Photoshop are bitmapped. THe following types of files are bitmapped:

• .jpg
• .jpeg
• .bmp
• .gif
• .png
• .tif

Vector Graphics

A vector graphic is actually specified mathematically in the file. It can be zoomed indefinitely large without showing any pixels because it can be scaled up mathematically by the application that is doing the zooming. For example, if you have a PDF that contains only vector graphics, you can keep zooming it and zooming it and you won’t see any jagged edges made up of solid colour rectangles. Vector graphics are useful for your designer because they can save the graphic at any size needed without degradation in the quality of the image. (Bitmapped files can also be resized, but in some cases the resized image will be noticeably poorer in quality than the original.)

PDF Files

A PDF file can contain all vector graphics, all bitmapped graphics, or some of both. They easiest way to test if a PDF file is all vector graphic is to zoom it up large (try 800%) to see if rectangles start to show.

Resolution

Sometimes all you have is a bitmapped graphic (for example when you’re using a photograph). In that case, you’ll want to provide the webmaster with the highest resolution file you have. The resolution refers to the number of pixels (rectangles) across the width of the image and the height of the images. For example, the photo from your 8 megapixel camera might be 3264 pixels wide and 2448 pixels tall.

Online vs Print

The resolution of your photographs is particularly important when your designer is creating something that will be printed out, like a business card, magazine ad, or brochure. This is because paper is capable of showing much more detail than a computer screen and we want to take advantage of that feature. Although the number of pixels displayed per inch on a computer monitor varies from monitor to monitor, the standard is 72 pixels per inch. Compare this to printers, which can print 300 or more dots of ink per inch.

So if you have a photo that is 1080 pixels wide, it would display around 15 inches wide on a computer monitor, but only 3.6 inches wide on paper. So that photo is going to be quite useful for your website, but not so useful if you want to create a poster.

Doing the Math

Let’s say you have a photograph to be displayed on your website that you want to be around 3 inches across. The width in pixels will need to be at least:
3 inches x 72 pixels per inch = 216 pixels wide

If you want that same photograph to be printed out on paper around 3 inches across, the width in pixels will need to be at least:
3 inches x 300 pixels per inch = 900 pixels wide

Something to be aware of is that images often don’t scale well to sizes that that are just a bit smaller (say 80%) than the original image size. If you want a 900 pixel wide image to be printed, it’s better to give your designer a 2700 pixel wide image than a 1000 pixel wide image.

Also, note that bitmapped images do not scale up well. The rectangles are going to start showing. Although there is software on the market today that purports to “res up” (increase the resolution) of bitmapped images, there are significant limitations to what is possible and the image is likely to be blurred by the process. (More more information on that, read this article on About.com).

I recently attended this online seminar, and was surprised about some of the things I learned. It’s about an hour long, and you can view it here:

https://www.hubspot.com/the-science-of-email-marketing

Dan obtained access to statistics for 9 billion (!) emails sent using MailChimp, and analyzed them. He also held focus groups and received several hundred responses to a survey. Here are some of the findings Dan presented, along with my own thoughts.

When Should I Send Emails?

It’s a myth that business to business communications are different than business to consumer communications

It turns out that about 88% of people do not have separate work and personal inboxes. They read their personal and work related email from the same inbox, so personal emails get read at work and work emails at home. And most clickthroughs (clicking a link in an email to find more information) happen on the weekend. Perhaps this is because readers feel they have more time on the weekend to do this.

On top of that, it turns out that the days people are most likely to unsubscribe from your emails are Mondays and Tuesdays. So it’s not a bad idea to send your marketing emails on weekends, when they are more likely to be clicked through and when unsubscribes are not that high.

Data also showed that there is a sharp spike upwards in clickthroughs first thing in the morning. There is also a spike up in unsubscribes at that time of day, but the net effect is that it is still best to send early in the day.

How Often Should I Send Emails?

This one totally surprised me. Turns out that sending frequency doesn’t affect clickthrough much. Although sending once per month gets the best clickthroughs, sending more often gets only slightly fewer click throughs per email. The surprise for me was that sending often does not substantially increase unsubscribe rates. And since you’re really interested in the total number of clickthroughs not the rate of clickthroughs per email, you get better results by sending more often. So Dan says “Don’t be afraid to send too much.”

This may be because most people who don’t want your emails will unsubscribe on the first email they receive (something the data showed). After that you are dealing with people who are more likely to want your emails. As long as you are giving them value in each email, they are not that likely to unsubscribe.

What Format Should my Emails Be?

80% of users queried indicated that they read email on mobile devices, so optimizing the presentation of your email for mobile devices is likely to increase your clickthrough rates. This may mean doing a text-only email instead of HTML, or it may mean formatting your HTML to work nicely on mobile devices.

What Content Should my Emails Contain?

Including valuable reference information in your emails encourages people to want to receive your email and to devote some time to reading it. So include content, not just advertisements.

People interviewed indicated that their favourite emails were those that made them feel special – part of a select group. So give them something only subscribers get. This might be access to special information or discount codes.

Include multiple links through to your website, too. Data showed that the more links in your email the more clickthroughs you get per email. This may be a result of the reader having received various types of invitations to click and finally encountering one that “speaks” to them.

Interestingly data also showed that there was also less unsubscribing when there are more links. So find opportunities to incorporate more links into your email. Try out different invitations to click.

Instead of including a request asking people to forward your email to friends or colleagues who might be interested, ask them follow you on a social network like Twitter. They are more likely to do this and eventually those who follow them will become aware of you.

What Words Should I Use in Email Titles?

People often wonder what words to use in the title. I always assumed I should focus on the topic of the newsletter, and leave out what seemed like “wasted” words like “Newsletter”, “eNews”, “Issue” etc. Turns out that was a mistake. People are more likely to click through (which means they actually read the email in the first place) when words in the title indicated that is was a serialized newsletter.

Here are some of the words that showed up often in emails with good clickthrough rates.

• E-newsletter
• week’s
• issue
• digest
• bulletin
• edition
• news

This may not mean that just using those words makes a difference. It may be that serial newsletters in general get more clickthroughs. So try having a regular newsletter and making it clear in the title that this is what it is.

The From Address

Make sure you use a from address that the recipient will recognize. If they know you by business name, use that; if they know you by personal name use that.

Junk Email Accounts

Although people often don’t have separate work and personal email accounts, they often do have separate email addresses for receiving what they consider to be junk emails. (58% of people polled indicated they had a “junk” account.) The junk email addresses are what they use in order to access information, create accounts, or enter draws, from organizations whose emails they don’t want to have to read later.

To get them to give you their “real” email address, you need to offer something that will make them want to get your emails. This might be good informational content or time-sensitive offers they will be interested in. Seems to me, that when all is said and done, “Content is [still] king”.

1. Type the words that are going to link somewhere.
2. Select those words with the mouse.
3. Click the editor button that looks like a link in the chain. (This button doesn’t get activated till you select the text.)
4. Fill in the Link URL box. To link to a web page, the address should be: https://www.whatever.com. Don’t forget the https://. To make the link trigger an email to someone, remove the https:// from the Link URL box and type mailto:someone@whatever.com.
5. Click Insert.
6. Click Publish/Update back in the Add New Post/Edit Post screen.

You can link a picture too. Just insert the picture as usual, and then click it picture once (in the editor) and then follow steps 3 to 5 above.

1. Click the cursor at the start of the paragraph you want to put the image beside. Even if you are going to float the image to the right, you still click at the left, before the first word in the paragraph.
2. Click the little image to the right of Upload/Insert, above the editor. (If you hover your mouse over it, a tooltip will display “Add an Image”.) The screen will go grey and a popup window will display.
3. If you’re going to use a picture that has never been used in the blog before, click the Select Files button in the popup and then find the picture on your computer. Wait for it to upload – you will see a progress bar that says “Crunching” while it uploads. Then go to step 5.
4. If you want to insert a picture that has been used in the blog before, click Media Library. Find the image you want to use and click Show to the right of it. Then go to step 5.
5. Type in a description of what the picture is (e.g. “Photo of ABC Storefront”) in the Alternate Text box. This is for the search engines.
6. If you want a caption below it, fill in the Caption box.
7. Choose whether you want the picture Left, Center, or Right justified using the radio buttons. (I find that the design works more nicely when the image is to the right and not the left.)
8. WordPress automaticaly resizes the photo into several sizes for you, which are called Thumbnail, Medium, Large and Full Size. The dimensions of the images it has created are shown as ### x ###. The first number is the width and the second is the height; both are in pixels. Choose a good size. If you are floating text around an image, usually 300 pixels high or tall is good. For larger photos which are not going to have text beside them, and are usually centered, you can go to 450 pixels wide or tall.
9. Click Insert into Post (not Save all Changes; this just puts the image into the media library).
10. Now you will be back in the Add New Post or Edit Post page. Don’t forget to click the blue Publish/Update button in the post to save the picture in the post.

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