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This tutorial will show you how to create and publish a post on your site, whether it’s your first or 100th time.

To create a post, we will be accessing a part of Sites called the Dashboard.

To do this, make sure you are logged into your Sites account by either going to https://sites.psu.edu/ and clicking Login in the top right hand corner, or by going to your site’s URL and clicking Login in the top black bar.

If you are already logged into Sites, that top black bar should look something like this:

Now that you are logged in, up in that menu bar, hover over the section My Sites, to get a list of your sites. In this case, you probably have just the one for NUTR360, but may have more depending on if you’ve created a site before.

In the drop-down list that appears, hover the name of your NUTR360 site, and select Dashboard from the slide-out menu.

dashboard menu

Once you do, you will be presented with your Dashboard page, that will look like this:

dashboard

On the left hand side of this page is a column that you can use to navigate to different tools and sections of your site.

To start a new post, hover your cursor over the section marked Posts, and from the slide-out menu that appears, select Add New.

Posts menu

You will now be taken to a page where you can write a new post! Toward the top is a box that says Enter Title Here. Enter whatever you would like your post to be titled when it’s published.

post page

In general, a post title should be well thought out, attention grabbing, and specific to your audience. Think: “Why should someone read this?”

The large white box in the center of the screen is where you will enter the content of your post. Before you type anything in there, though, we just need to change one quick setting.

In the top right corner of this content box, you will see two tabs that look like this:

The Text tab will most likely be selected, so we want to click on the Visual tab to switch over to that setting. Once you do, the toolbar of the box will change to look more like any other word processor that you’ve used before.

WYSIWYG toolbar

Here you have the standard buttons for bold, italics, text alignment, bullet points, etc. You also have the option to add hyperlinks (see this tutorial on adding links), and also include headings in your posts.

To make a heading, click on the box on the left-hand side of the toolbar that will by default say Paragraph. When you do, a drop-down menu will appear, giving you heading options, and you will be able to see exactly how big each heading will be.

headings

When a heading is selected, all of the text you enter into the post will be formatted for that heading. Simply switch this setting back to “Paragraph” in the drop-down menu to return to normal text size and style.

All that’s left now is to start adding your content. Your work can either be copied and pasted from elsewhere, or you can just start typing into the text box. See also these tutorials for adding photos and embedding videos into your posts.

At anytime while you’re working, you can preview what your post is going to look like by clicking the Preview button in the top right of the Publish box on the right side of the screen. Your preview post will open in a new tab of your browser.

publish options

A post that you’re creating will also be saved as a draft automatically, but you can click the Save Draft button, which is next to the preview button, to make sure your changes are saved.

For NUTR360, you will also be assigning categories and tags to your posts. Please see this tutorial on how to create a category and the purpose of doing so. See this tutorial for creating and using tags.

When your post is ready to go, simply hit the blue “Publish” button to make it live on your site! Keep in mind that publishing is never permanent, and you can always go back and edit or delete your post at any time.

publish