After logging in, you will see the Ideas on Europe dashboard:

To put up an article nice and easily, the best method is to click on “Posts” in the left-hand sidebar,  then “Add New“.

You will be presented with a page that looks much like an email composition form – with a long thin box for the title, underneath which is a larger box for entering your text – complete with icons for adding bold and italic text, bullet points, quotes, text formatting and so on.

This works just like writing an email – so for a simple post, just enter your title and text.

Just as with an email or Word document, to use the formatting options, simply select the text you want to change and then click on the appropriate button. More options – including for text colours, inserting special characters and so on – can be found by clicking on the button on the far right of the formatting options above the text entry box. Hover your mouse over each button to find out what they do.

In this additional set of formatting options, you will also notice two buttons (underneath the text alignment options) for inserting text that you have written in another programme – either as plain text or from a MS Word document. The latter in particular is a handy way of pasting in an article that you have already formatted the way you want in Word – simply click on the button and a window will pop up in your browser. Paste your document in here, and all formatting should be kept as you want it.

Hint: To make your article easier to read on screen, press enter twice at the end of each paragraph to leave a nice line break – otherwise it will just end up looking like a big block of text.

When you’re done, simply click on the blue “Publish” button in the right-hand sidebar – just like clicking “Send” for an email.

Now your article will be live on the site. There are also options to “Save as Draft” – to allow you to return to your post later – and “Preview” – to let you see how your post will look before sending it live.

However, before you click “Publish” it is worth adding in some extra information to ensure that people can find your article more easily – this can be in the form of “Tags” and “Categories“.

Tags can be anything you like that is related to your article’s content – they are a handy way of finding other articles on the same subject. Think of them as the entries in an index, or as article keywords. So, if you are writing an article about, say, the British Conservative Party’s new group in the European Parliament, you may want to add in tags like “Conservative Party”, “European Parliament”, “EU”, and perhaps either “ECR” or “European Conservatives and Reformists”. Each tag should be separated by a comma – and leave out the quotation marks. Once you’ve entered all the tags you want, click “Add“.

Categories help to place your article into the correct part of the site, and are again a powerful way of helping people to find what you have written (as well as of keeping the site nice and tidy).  A selection of categories appear below the “Tags” box – just tick the ones that best apply to your article (ideally not more than three), and it will automatically appear in those parts of the site. If you feel that your article doesn’t fit into any of the existing categories, contact the site administrators with you suggestion for a new category – but hopefully the existing ones, combined with the Tags, should already cover most areas.

It can also be worth adding an Excerpt - in the little underneath the main text entry box. This is the space for a short introduction to your article – about a sentence or so – to explain what it is about. This is the short piece of text that will appear on the front page of the site when your post appears there. Think of it as a way of quickly selling your article to potential readers – it’s not essential, but can be a good way of ensuring that you get read.

If you forget any of these steps, or want to alter your article after publishing, you can go back by clicking on “Edit Posts” and selecting the article you want to change at any time. When you’re done, just click “Update Page” in the right-hand sidebar, and your changes will be live.