About Categories, Excerpts and Featured Images

All posts can be set to one or more categories. Assigning a category to a post allows you to group all your posts together. You can display all your categories in a widget or you can display all the posts of a certain category in a menu.

1 – Assign a Category to your post

Assigning a Category in a Post

1. Make sure you are editing the right post.
2. Check the Category that this post should be assigned to. A post can be assigned to multiple categories. In this example this post has been assigned the category ‘Tutorials’.
3. Update the post to save all your changes.

2 – Add an excerpt to your post

Add an Excerpt to a post

Normally in a blog listing page or a Category listing page (these are called Archive pages), you can display an entire post or a short description of the post in the page. If you have opted to show a short description of the post then by default WordPress will grab a few lines from the actual post. Instead if you put in an excerpt of your post in the ‘Excerpt’ column, WordPress will display the excerpt. This is a much better way of controlling what appears in your archive page.

1. Look for the ‘Excerpt’ heading when editing a post.
2. Add text you wish to appear in the Category Archive Page

2a: This is an example of an Archive page

Archive page with an excerpt

Here you see list of all posts for a particular cartegory with the excerpt of each post under the post header.

3. Add a Featured Image to your post

Add a Featured Image

I have seen different themes vary with the way they support the ‘Featured Image’. Normally most themes are at least set up for the featured image to appear in the category archive page as a thumbnail. (The Featured Image may also appear as an image under your Post title). We will assume here that it appears as thumbnail.

1. Click on ‘Set featured image’. This will take you to the normal steps of inserting an image.

3b. Select the image

Add a Featured Image – b

1. Follow the steps of as described in how to insert an image. The only difference here is that you need to click on ‘Use as featured image’ Instead on ‘Insert into Post’.

3c. The image will be displayed in WordPress

Add a Featured Image – c

1. The image is displayed in the post under the ‘Featured Image’ .

3d. Finally what it looks like in the Archive Page

Add a Featured Image – d

1. Post is set to the ‘Blog’ Category.
2. Text added in the ‘Excerpt’ column of the Post in WordPress.
3. Featured Image added in the ‘Featued Image’ column of the Post in WordPress.

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