Kim Avery Coaching

What Is a Blockquote?

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quote-mark“What is a blockquote?” is only the first question. Then you need to ask, “How do I use it, and how can I style it?” We are going to have some fun today!

According to Wikipedia, a blockquote is a style element “used to indicate the quotation of a large section of text from another source.” One of the most common uses of blockquotes is to set apart testimonials on a page. As you look at different websites, you may notice that they are indented and sometimes have a light colored background and different text style.

Your WordPress theme allows you to easily insert a blockquote, by clicking the quote-mark icon up in the formatting toolbar. Just highlight a paragraph of text and click it — go ahead and try it and see how it looks in your theme.

This paragraph uses the blockquote formatting
that is part of the design of this theme.
You can see how it is indented, and the type style
is different from regular paragraph text.

It is also possible to create different styles for blockquotes by adding to the html or by adding different style classes to your CSS file. And if that’s greek to you, then get somebody to do it for you.

Troubleshooting Blockquotes

Sometimes your blockquotes may not play nicely, and you get unexpected results.

In WordPress, the formatting options for Bold, Italic, and Blockquote all work the same way. You should first type the text, then highlight it, and then click the formatting icon. That is because you are really inserting some HTML code into your webpage, and these particular commands come with an opening tag and a closing tag that surround the affected text.

In a word processor, if you click the icon to bold something, all the text you type after that will be bold, until you click the icon again to turn it off. In WordPress, when you click the icon, it puts in the opening tag and the closing tag right there. The text must be between the tags to show that formatting. Here’s an example:

html-tags

The reason I’m telling you this is because sometimes your blockquote (or other formatting style) doesn’t look right. You can go into the HTML view and make an adjustment by moving the closing tag (the one with the / ) to the right place.

What are some of your ways to use blockquotes? Share with us in the comments section!

2 Comments

  1. Kim Avery

    How did you get so smart :)?

    • Susan Fleming

      I have a smart God. He speaks HTML! …and lots of other languages, too 🙂