The first tip for laying out the text in a post is to ask yourself whether you might not be better off with one or more smaller posts. I say this because some people have a lot of material to deal with and they are not sure how to break it up visually. Sometimes the simple answer is to break up the content into separate posts or pages. Pagination is a fair option but you will need additional plug-ins and the skills to properly implement them.
Another great option is setting up a category for a particular subject and doing mini posts. Your visitor can “be lead” to this category and see all your posts dealing with the subject matter. No plug-ins or additional coding skills needed. In the case of pages, when there is a lot of content on a single page, ask yourself, would it be better served up by breaking the content into separate pages? Each page could have its own focus.
Long posts appearing on your index.php / home.php page, how do I manage them? If you are using a theme and your homepage is not static, WordPress has what I think is a very elegant system for handling short summaries of posts. There’s the MORE button, which allows you to control each post individually and decide whether the full text is displayed or only a portion of it with a Read More link. There’s the Excerpt feature, which functions automatically on all posts, but not all themes use the Excerpt feature. We covered this in an earlier WordPress blog, controlling it within the WordPress loop. It is important to understand the loop and how it works.
The MORE button is easy to use. Simply place your cursor at the point in the text where you want to cut off the post and display a Read MORE link, and click MORE. The easiest way to get rid of the More line is to click it so that you see drag points around its edges, and then hit Delete or backspace on your keyboard. If you want to move the MORE link, hightlight by clicking on it and then left click and drag it to the new location. I rarely use the visual editor but it should work the same in both.
Even if your theme does not currently use the Excerpt feature, it’s worth entering a special summary in the Excerpt box while you’re adding a new post. That way, some time in the future, if you use another theme or modify the current one to use excerpts, you won’t need to go back through everything adding excerpts. Personally, I would consider controlling it in the WordPress loop itself.
Tags: Excerpt, Theme, Web Design, WordPress
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