There are some basic rules for WordPress content editors and content managers. Invisible lines that should not be crossed but cause the eyes of many a dev to roll when they first log into a new client site under management.
Here is the short list. I will elaborate on this at some time in the future.
- Your job is to manage content not style. Don’t colour text or change font sizes. Everything you need should be predetermined and selectable in the editor (because someone already designed and coded the site to do this).
- Use headings. H1, H2, H3 etc are hierarchical and they give users (and Google) important information about your site. Just one H1 heading per page please.
- DO NOT underline text. Underlines are for links. If it’s a link and it needs to be underlined this will happen automatically. If you want to make something stand out use italics or bold.
- Images need to be made web ready before you upload them. It’s not cool to upload images straight from the camera to WordPress. Why? Well this takes up lots of space on the server unnecessarily, uses more bandwidth and it frustrates people on slow connections or mobile phones downloading giant images.
- Spaces and returns are not meant to be for layout. Avoid using this as a tactic for layout. Ask your developer to update the theme or styles if you need changes.
- If you hit ‘enter’ this makes a new paragraph. If you hit ‘shift+enter’ this makes a new line.
- And finally… DO NOT EVER copy and paste directly from Word into your editor without using the special icon to remove all the nasty extra code that Word loves to create.
