Your First Steps Using WordPress
So here we are, inside of the WordPress dashboard! You’ll notice there are plenty of places to go and it might seem a little overwhelming – don’t worry, we’re gonna take some baby steps to show you around the various places in WordPress.
You’ll notice right off the bat the “view site” link, which does exactly what is means – it shows you what your site looks like to visitors. To the right, you’ll see the main navigation of your WordPress control panel. Each tab has further navigation when you click on the right to take you to specific destinations.
First, let’s point out a few things you’ll want to do as a new user. Make sure you go in and change your password NOW. Use a long password (8-10 characters) that is a combination of letters and numbers. You will also want to fill out the profile fields and change the “Display name publicly as” so when you blog, people see your name as the author (and not “admin”).
So let’s explore the navigation, shall we? Head over to the right and click the drop down box next to “Posts”. Here you will see some different options that relate to your site’s “posts”. Before we go any further, let’s explain what the difference between a “post” and a “page” are:
Page: a static, regular website page (for example, “About”, “Contact”, “Discography”)
Post: a blog post. These will show up in your RSS feed and in your blog, and have extra capabilities like tagging and commenting features, and are organized by monthly archives and categories.
For the most part, editing either post or page is exactly the same, I just wanted to clarify what the difference is for each.
If we click the “edit” link, you’re brought to a screen that let’s you access all the posts in your blog. Because this is a brand new blog, there’s just the default post available.
By clicking the “Add new” link, you’ll then have the ability to create and publish a blog post using a pretty user-friendly visual-rich text editor. You can see in the screenshot below where you can add the title, the editor where you add the content, and a slew of other formatting and navigation options.
You’ll notice that you have a ton of control over how to add content in a blog post, with the ability to add images, videos, and audio files, and format your text just like you would using any other text editor like Microsoft Word – easily align text and add hyperlinks.
We’ll get into more detail how to add content in the next tutorial. Before we jump into that, there’s just a few tips on setting your WordPress installation up that I want to get out of the way. Let’s head on over to the “Settings” tab and click the drop down arrow.
In your “General Settings”, be sure to add a tagline to replace the default one. Some times various themes will display this tagline, and for the time being, let’s just make sure we have something unique that describes your music.
Next, head on over to your “Reading Settings”. Now, by default, WordPress will show your latest blog posts on the front page. If you just so wanted to create a static “Home” page, here you can have the option of doing so, and suggesting another page to have your blog posts appear on (usually titled “blog”). If you want to use this option, you’ll have to first publish those pages in order for them to appear in the drop down box.
Next head on over to the “Discussion” section to check out some options on how you would like comments to be moderated on your blog posts. I highly recommend checking the following box, as many spammers will quickly find your blog and make it a wasteland of pharmacy and porn links if you don’t approve every comment (more on this to come later).
Finally, head on over to the “Permalinks” section. Go ahead and click the “month and name” option. This way, when you publish blog posts, your keywords from your title appear in your url string (instead of a bunch of numbers), which will help your SEO efforts out down the road.
Okay, that’s it! Now that we have these little things out of the way, let’s jump into how we can begin adding content to our site and get the ball rolling!
Join the forum discussion on this post - (2) Posts