WordPress Tips: Previewing Your Post in WordPress

I fought for a long time to get Post Preview put into the Write Post Panel of WordPress. We were so thrilled. Prior to that, we had to have at least two browser windows open, one with the Write Post Panel and the other with the preview of the post in the WordPress Theme. Now, with one click of the “jump” link, the user could jump down to the preview or jump back up to the editing section, and get the real live view of what your blog post looked like when published.

Then, for reasons I still don’t understand, WordPress removed the jump link. Users were forced to scroll down manually to see the preview. New users couldn’t figure out why their Write Post panels were taking so long to load when they clicked Save and Continue Editing. Until they just happened to scroll down and see the preview. Surprise!

Then WordPress.com removed the post preview, and the removal went into the full version - and a lot of veterans were not happy. A link was added to open a preview in a new window or tab, but that caused it’s own confusion. If you have a lot of tabs open, the preview opens at the end of the row, which you may or may not be able to see or easily access if you aren’t using a extension or option to permit multiple tab rows. I had one user open up over a dozen tabs of her post preview when she kept clicking, thinking she wasn’t doing it right.

The excuse given for removal of the post preview was to save bandwidth and complaints of slow page loading. Hmm, let’s see. When you Save and Continue Editing, you consume bandwidth. Now you have to open the preview in a new tab/window, which consumes bandwidth and loads a full view of your blog post in the WordPress Theme. And increases your waiting time as you wait for each page to reload each time you make a change. Equals out to me, doesn’t it to you? That is, unless you are one of those who just writes and hits Publish, then fixes things later.

I say, you want to save bandwidth, clean up the bandwidth page loading and reloading with comments and put the post preview back so we can see what our posts really look like before we hit Publish, in my humble opinion.

The WYSIWYG Rich Text Editor does not allow you to really see what your blog post will look like when published in your WordPress Theme. It gives you an “idea”, but not the actual look. If you by accident use the wrong heading tag or mess up a link or list, you may not really see it until it published. So checking a preview of your post is critical to catch the boo boos before they appear on your blog.

So how do you work more efficiently with the Post Preview system as it stands now?
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