Home / Articles

the WordPress dashboard
2010 . May . 10
Pink Sheep Media

The first thing you should know about having a WordPress site that’s been installed by us, is that it’s not easy to destroy it. Even if you did break something so badly that we didn’t know how to fix it, we would just nuke the site and load the backup. You might lose a couple of weeks worth of post. Maybe. We don’t say this as a dare! But we want to encourage you to be bold.

The good thing about WordPress, is that they’ve done a good job providing instructions for how to do things. Take some time to click around the dashboard and user interface and read the notes the WordPress gurus have left there. Also, remember that you won’t ever need to know how to do everything. There are a few tasks that you’ll do often, and there’s a few tasks that you’ll do once in  a while, and there’s large amount of tasks you may never need to do.

The Dashboard

When you log into your WordPress site, you are usually redirected to the Dashboard. The dashboard is a kind of overview page and you can navigate back there easily because the link to the dashboard is always present at the very top of the menu. WordPress comes with lots of nifty menu options and cool functionality.

the WordPress dashboard

Part of what makes WordPress so awesome is that folks contribute plugins that can extend the functionality. If your website uses plugins, then you might have even more options on your menu.

Save and Review

Most of the things you will do with WordPress will require hitting a “Publish,” “Save Draft,” “Update,” or “Save” button after you complete the task in order to implement the changes. So just remember to look for the Save buttons. After you save, remember to review the refreshed website page to ensure that your changes did what you had hoped. Be your own best quality tester!

Write a post! Here’s how.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts

Other posts we’ve written to help you understand WordPress

WordPress comes with a visual editor and an HTML editor to help you publish posts and pages.

Understanding the pages-posts distinction in WordPress.

Get a globally recognized avatar.

What is your WordPress profile?

Other Resources at WordPress

http://codex.wordpress.org/Getting_Started_with_WordPress#WordPress_for_Beginners

http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page