How to Customize Your WordPress Workspace for Writing

By Lisa Sabin-Wilson, Cory Miller, Kevin Palmer, Andrea Rennick, and Michael Torbert from WordPress All-in-One For Dummies

To write a post for your WordPress blog, you open the Add New Post page. There you have options that let you arrange the WordPress workspace and create a custom environment that suits your writing needs. To start customizing your workspace, open the Add New Post page by clicking Add New in the Posts drop-down list on the Dashboard.

To make the Post text box (where you write the content of your post) bigger, click your mouse in the bottom corner of the box, and while holding down your mouse button, drag it until it’s the length you want, and then release your mouse button (conversely, you can make the box smaller by dragging it up, rather than down).

Adjust the size of the Post text box.

Several items appear on the Add New Post page. You may not use all these items, and in fact, you may find that simply removing them from the Add New Post page (and the Edit Post page) makes writing your posts easier and more efficient. To remove an item, follow these steps:

Click the Screen Options tab at the top of the screen.

The Screen Options panel drops down.
Select or deselect items below the Show on Screen heading.

Select an item by placing a check mark in the check box to the left of its name; deselect it by removing the check mark. Selected items appear on the page, and deselected items are removed from the page.

If you deselect an item that you want to include again on the Add New Post page, it’s not gone forever! Revisit the Screen Options panel and reselect its check box to make that item appears on the page once again.
Select your preferred Screen Layout.

You can choose whether the layout appears in one or two columns (the default option).
Click the Screen Options tab when you’re done.

The Screen Options panel closes and the options you’ve chosen are saved and remembered by WordPress.

Aside from being able to make the Post text box bigger (or smaller), you can’t edit the Post text box module. You can configure all other modules on the Add New Post page (and the Edit Post page); you can remove them, expand and collapse them, and drag them around to place them in a different spot on your screen.

Collapse, or close, any of the modules by hovering your mouse over the module title and then clicking the down arrow that appears to the right of the module name. (You can expand, or open, a module by doing the same when it’s collapsed.)

You can also drag and drop a module on the Add New Post screen to position it wherever you want. Just click a module and, while holding down the mouse button, drag it to different area on the screen. WordPress displays a dashed border around the area when you have the module hovering over a spot where you can drop it.