The article describes 10 steps to write and post a Community News website article. Other than the first step, creating your News Topic Category folders, which is done before writing news articles, these steps are done each time you add a new news article to your News website. While many of these tips apply to posting an article to any website, this article was mainly written to help authors post articles to a Joomla News website using a secure Linux computer. If some of your contributors do not yet have a secure Linux computer, they should email articles to someone who does so the articles can be properly formatted and securely posted to your news website.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these 10 steps.

#1 Create your Article & Image Category Folders on your Linux Home Computer & Website Admin Panel
In our previous article, we explained why and how to create Topic categories to place your News website articles in. Hopefully, this step has already been done. But you still need to decide which Topic category your article belongs in.

#2 Create a New Libre Writer Document & place in its Article Topic Category Folder on your Linux Home Computer
You should write your News articles with a web compatible Word Processing program – the best of which is called Libre Writer. Unfortunately, the most common Word Processing program, MS Word, has a huge amount of hidden bloated code that is so badly written that it can harm your website if you attempt to copy and paste from MS Word to your web posts. You therefore want to use a free Word Processing program called Libre Writer to create your posts. Libre Writer comes pre-installed on Linux Laptops and does not use a bunch of hidden code. We explain briefly how to create Writer documents at the following link: https://learnlinuxandlibreoffice.org/5-benefits-of-libreoffice-writer

In addition, we have an entire book and free self-paced course that goes into detail on how to create documents using Libre Write at this link: https://betterwordprocessing.com/

However, the process is similar to writing documents with Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Simply open a new Writer document, then type in the title of your document and save it to its Article Topic category folder. Your article title should be short so it fits in your website menu. But it should also contain key words describing what the article is about to help Search Engines categorize it properly.

#3 Write your article using Libre Writer
The first article you should write and post at the top of your Home page is called the Welcome Article. The title is typically titled Welcome to Our Website! The Welcome Article explains what your website is all about and why viewers should take the time to read it. Like all your other articles, your first article will consist primarily of a combination of text and images.

The first step to creating your Welcome article is to create a new Writer document. Save the document to your website 0 Welcome folder which should be in your Articles folder. This Welcome article (and most other articles) can be divided into the following 5 parts:

The primary reason we use Joomla instead of Wordpress to organize our website is that Joomla is much more secure than Wordpress. Joomla recognizes that the Internet is loaded with hackers and therefore makes security a top priority. Wordpress prioritizes simplicity above all else. But simplicity is one of the reasons why every year, Wordpress has nearly one thousand new security problems – many of which can not be patched – while Joomla has only a few security problems – all of which are patched immediately.

A second reason we use Joomla instead of Wordpress is functionality. Joomla has many features such as a customizable user access control system that does not exist in Wordpress.

But a third very important reason Joomla is a wiser choice than Wordpress is that Joomla organizes articles by TOPIC categories while Wordpress automatically organizes articles by YEAR AND MONTH. Wordpress handles topics by allowing the author to create and use “tags”.

Organizing articles by year and month creates two major problems. First, the Wordpress tag system is poorly recognized by Search Engines. Search for an article posted on a Wordpress website that has been around for a few years and it becomes obvious that the site has turned into a structural mess. The Search Engine is likely to take you to a top level page that has 10 articles per page and includes more than 20 pages of articles. If you do not know the exact date the article was published, you will need to scroll through 200 articles to find the one you want. It is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Do the same for a well organized Joomla website – which is first divided by topic – and the Search Engine is much more likely to take you directly to the article you are looking for. This is important because 90% of all new users will find your website by doing a Search Engine search for a particular TOPIC. No one does a search for a particular DATE.

A good example of the tendency of Wordpress News website to turn into a Search Engine mess over time is the Readers Digest. The website is divided into a few categories. But within each category, all articles appear on the same top level page automatically organized by year and month. Here is a link to the Readers Digest “Home” category page:

https://www.rd.com/home/

Scroll down the page and you will see a total of 30 articles, At the bottom of the page, you will see that there are a total of 25 pages in this category:

In short, this page actually has 30 times 25 or 750 articles! This problem will only get worse in the coming years as new articles are added to this poorly designed system.

Topic categories describe the scope of topics covered by your news website. Here are a few examples of the Topic Categories of various local news websites. This one has 8 top level news categories:

This one has 9 top level topic categories:

This one has 11 top level topic categories:

This one has 17 different top level topic options:

This one splits the top level topics into two menus totaling 18 options:

The problem with a lot of different topic categories in the top header of your news website is that new readers might get confused by all of the options. It would be better to place some of the topics or categories in a drop down second level hidden menu or better still to move them to a bottom menu. This is particularly true of topics such as About Us that have nothing to do with the actual news. We will review Home Page Layout in a later article. For now, we want to focus on the scope of topics covered by your local news website.