==== Newsletter Archive ====
I was on my way back from Italy this past week, writing some content on the plane and thinking about the people I help when I realized I hate the web when it comes to text formatting. Things like fonts, ordered lists, line breaks. They never seem to work right!
Sometimes WordPress formatting just plain stinks. And AWeber and Mailchimp? It can be just as frustrating.
I know you’ve been having a hard time with getting content into WordPress or your newsletter and then making it look right, below are some awesome tools, and concise information for fixing these things and making the experience less painful. I truly hope they’re helpful.
Writing text in a WordPress page but can’t seem to get the line breaks to work and you’re wondering why you can’t change the font?
%99 of problems come from pasting in content from Word (same for newsletters) and not using a plugin to enhance the editor (the format bar) in WordPress.
First of all, stop copying and pasting from Word. You may think it’s the best way to do things, but the truth is, the WordPress editor is not Word, and things are bound to get screwed up! Use the WordPress editor.
Other surprises? Hitting return does not put in the code to create a line break by default (the plugin linked below can turn this on though) and there aren’t any font options by default either! (because this is part of your theme as an entire website setting)
You can jump into the code view and add <br/> to force a line break, but you have to stay in HTML mode if you do this, when you switch back to Visual mode, it strips out the line break! Tip: be careful when switching between HTML and Visual mode!
Bottom line? Create your content in WordPress, and use this plugin to enable line breaks and additional styles. TinyMCE Advanced: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tinymce-advanced/
The same advice goes for newsletter services like Mailchimp and AWeber; create content on their sites!
As for fonts, in general, they are “set” for your website, as in, there’s a code file that sets what font a paragraph is going to be, and it’s not very easily changed for the non-technical.
If you want it changed, you’ll have to ask someone else, (AKA hire someone) or take some time and learn how to edit a CSS document and look at some code. You’re probably not interested in learning CSS, but if so, here’s a good article: https://codex.wordpress.org/Finding_Your_CSS_Styles
Or…if you just want the easy answer, reply and I’ll create a screencast video of how to change the paragraph font on a WordPress website.
Images are a pain to find, and I’m not sure if I’m allowed to use them!
PhotoDropper (another WordPress plugin) let’s you search Flickr’s free to use creative commons images WITHIN the editing window for WordPress. PhotoDropper saves time searching, and then hunting and saving images, making the entire process much less frustrating. PhotoDropper: https://www.photodropper.com/
You want images in your newsletters but they keep having issues? Check out this article on Mashable.
How to Ensure Your Subscribers See Images in Emails
There’s a ton more I want to share with you but I refuse to overload your inbox!
Have a question? Hit reply!
Have more tech requests for your website? —-> Check out the WordPress Maintenance Packages
