I have been contacted by people numerous times when their blogs were “broken” and they needed it fixed. There have been a variety of reasons behind the damage, but one common cause I’ve seen is through the misuse of Microsoft Word.
Like many other people, I do a lot of my writing in MS Word. There is nothing wrong with using Word to hammer out your blog posts, the problem lies when you transfer your post from Word to WordPress.
Bad things can happen if you transfer content from MS Word to WordPress the wrong way. So please please, pretty please with sugar on top, never copy and paste your post from Word directly into WordPress!
When you copy and paste your content from Word, you are copying the formatting as well. If this formatting is pasted directly into the post editor, your content may appear as it’s supposed to in the WYSIWYG editor, but things will most likely get funky when you hit that “publish” button. I have seen entire blogs become invisible due to the underlying formatting from Word.
If you’re going to copy and paste your blog posts from Word into your blog, then either paste the content into notepad first (and then copy and paste the notepad content into your blog) or use the built in Word clipboard found in your WYSIWYG editor.
After pasting the content into the Word clipboard, I usually click over to the html view just to ensure that there is no funny business left behind from Word. Once I’ve assured that everything looks clean, then I’ll head to the publish button.
So if you are copying your posts from Word into WordPress and your blog starts to look a little funky, check to see that you’re not adding anything to your posts that you shouldn’t be.