Updated: July 2, 2021
Introduction to your WP dashboard:
At this point, you should have already crossed these off your list assuming you have been following the tutorial.
- Set up the domain name
- Registered for website hosting
- Installed your WordPress blog
We will now proceed with familiarizing ourselves with the menus on WP. Below is a screenshot of the dashboard when you first register. The podcast goes through the function of each menu.
The platform itself, you will find very easy to use as it is intuitive. It’s really hard to screw anything up at this point, so make sure you click, see, and even set things to your own liking.
There will be some menu items to avoid tampering with and I mention those. Unless you’re familiar with coding, you do not want to mess with things like the CSS function. It is a recipe for disaster and should be left to the experts 🙂 . The most important buttons, the ones that you will be using most often include your:
Dashboard Home – This is where you will get the stats for your blog. Visits and where the traffic came from.
Media – This is where you upload images, pdf files, and even video. As suggested on the podcast, link specific images to the post you’re working on. This will save time in the future when you have a lot of media files. One thing you need to be aware of is that images can be big and take up a lot of space. What this does is slow down your website considerably for your audience. You don’t want that. If your page loads too slowly, people will get turned off, click off and never return. You want to get the images a small as possible without loss of quality.
Pages:
These are the pages that make up your blog. Pages are for example “posts” , “contact”, “disclosure” etc. This is the meat of the blog that makes things cohesive and helps people find what they are looking for without too much hunting.
Appearance:
This is the design of the blog itself and it is exactly what it sounds like, how you want the menu to look and how you want your landing page setup. It’s something that most people fool around with from time to time, but as a beginner, I would leave it as is until you are familiar with the blog.
Comments – If people take the time to comment on your posts, you owe it to them to reply. If you don’t, they will go away. If you would rather not have any comments on your blog, you can shut it off (not recommended).
Users:
These are people that have access to your blog. As the owner, you are automatically placed as an administrator. That means you have carte blanche on everything and can make any changes. If for example, you commission someone to write posts for you, you can give them limited access as an author for instance, and they will have limited ability. You definitely don’t want to add administrators to your blog unless you trust them explicitly.
The next post will touch on themes and the plugins you need to start with to give you a more cohesive blog. There are literally thousands of plugins and it can be overwhelming. You just need a few.
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Nice tutorial! It’s sure to help out a new blogger.
Thanks Latoya. I hope so 🙂
I am not a fan of the dashboard in WP. It can sometimes be more complex than necessary. I hope they plan an update to it soon.
That’s interesting to hear. I find it easy to use. I’ve heard people talk about drag and drop platforms, but l actually find them a bit harder. Hopefully, l explained it in a cohesive way :-).
What a great introduction! The dashboard can be a little intimidating, but this was great!
Thank you. I know for newbies, it can be a bit daunting, so l’m glad you think this will help.
Thank for the tips!! I will keep these in mind for my blog.
Thank you for reading. I hope you jump in at some point. There’s always room for a new voice.
I use Blogger, but this is cool. I’ve always been a little envious of the WordPress format and simplicity.
I remember using Blogger many, many years ago. I hardly remember it. It was in those days when everything was super hard to use :-).
Great tutorial! Great for new bloggers!
Cool! Thanks for the input 🙂
This is a great source for new bloggers. I’ll be sharing.
Wow! Thanks so much. I appreciate it very much 🙂
Great Tutorial, Where were you at the beginning of the year when I was trying to figure out WordPress? LOL
Thanks… Haha! Who knew? I had been thinking about it for a while because l was being asked and finally thought maybe put it somewhere all together for the others that come after us. Please share so we can spare others the pain… 🙂
This is a nice tutorial. WordPress can be so confusing. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks. Yes, it sure can be. Hopefully this will make it a bit less so 🙂
Thanks for sharing! I just shared with my twitter followers. I’m sure it can help out quite a few people. I feel like i stumbled through learning it all on my ow.
I love the word you used. Stumbled! Yep..it can be a bit intimidating when you see it, so hopefully, it will be less so for others. I needed plain language not over my head babble 😉 . Thanks for sharing.
OMG I needed this when I first switched to WP. I was so freaking lost, this is a great resource to share because people join the WP platform daily. Jus
It’s been a long time coming. Maybe too late for us, but hopefully it will help others get used to it quickly. 🙂
Do you know if embedding tweets and Instagram pictures also slow down your site? I have been experiencing a slower load time than usually and those are two changes I know that I started using.
The Instagram pictures will slow your website down a bit. It basically has to get the pictures from IG storage and then load them on to your page. I will assume the tweets embedded would do the same as most third party platforms will. They are what l call a necessary evils :-). What you might do is activate your “photon” in the jetpack setting. This will optimize your images, and hopefully speed up the load time. I don’t use it personally, but if you do, the next time your pictures look weird..it’s more than likely photon is the culprit and you need to turn it off. I wouldn’t worry unless your speed is wicked slow.
Awesome info! I could have definitely used this a few years back. Thanks!
Me too. Me too 🙂 . It would have been very nice.