Liberals Unite Style Guideline

HEADLINES:

  • Aim for 60 characters or less in your headlines.
  • Each word should begin with a capital letter, but the entire words should not be capitalized.
  • Do not use full quotation marks. Use only single quotation marks in headlines.

BODY:

  • We loosely use AP style. Here’s a quick reference guide.
  • The dateline (city and state) should be formatted as such: ANYTOWN, Calif. (all of the state abbreviations are in the reference guide.
  • With the exception of colons, all punctuation goes inside quotation marks.
  • Please only hit the space bar once after a period.
  • When showing a series of words, such as “I like blueberries, strawberries and plates,” do not put a comma before the conjunction.
  • You don’t want your article to be too long, but Google typically only finds articles if they have about 300 words – so aim for between 300 and 500 words.

TO ADD AN IMAGE:

  • Save the desired image to your desktop (DO NOT USE GETTY OR A.P. IMAGES OR ANY IMAGE WITH A WATERMARK). If you need something special for your article, ask Samuel if he has time.
  • Click on “Add Media” (above the field for entering your article).
  • Click on “Upload Files” and either drag your picture into the window or “select files” and select it from where you saved it. Select the largest size.
  • Select “center alignment” and “insert into post.”
  • Once you are done with that, go to the bottom right hand of the page, where it says, “set featured image.” A bunch of pictures will come up. Select the one you already put in the article and click, “set featured image.” This will be the image that will show when you share the article.

TO ADD AN EXCERPT:

  • On the very top right-hand side of the page, there is a button that says, “Screen Options.” Click on that.
  • Then it will show you several fields. Some have check marks, some don’t. Check “Excerpt” and leave the rest as they are.
  • Then, below the window where you enter the article, you’ll see an excerpt field.
  • In that field, you’ll want to write around 100 characters to describe your article. It could be a couple sentences taken from your article or you could write something unique.

WHEN FINISHED:

  • Go to the top right box. Just below the button where it says, “Save Draft,” it says, “status.” Click on “Edit.” You’ll see a drop down where it says “Draft.” Click on the dropdown and change it to “Pending.” Then click, “OK.”
  • Post to the group that you have one pending.

Here’s a pretty decent tutorial on posting to WordPress.

We will be updating the site as time goes on, so stay tuned…