Get to know your Dashboard

Your Dashboard is where everything you need to do to write a post is located. A couple of things I want to mention:Underneath Title, where it says Post, are two tabs, Visual, and Code. You are mostly going to want to use Visual, which is also known as WYSIWYG, or What You See Is What You Get. What you put in the post area is exactly what will show up on your blog. You will only occasionally need to use the Code tab if there is a specific piece of code you want in the post.

Underneath that are your formatting tools-bold, italics, strikethrough, links for creating a bulleted or numbered list, and then a really important one, a small symbol that looks like a piece of chain link. It will look greyed out until you highlight a piece of text, then it will appear more bold. Click it, and a box pops up to put in the HTML for the link. There’s also a broken link for undoing the link.

Next to that is a small graphic of a tree, that is your insert image link. Click that to insert a photo into your post.

Now let’s look along the right side of the page. Categories-you can name your categories anything you want. Type in the name and click add, then make sure the box next to the category name is checked. Discussion-if you want to turn off the comments, uncheck Allow Comments.

Post Password, for if you want to password-protect a very private post.

Post Slug-An interesting feature. You might have a really long title for your post, but you don’t need the whole title to be part of the permanent post link, so you can “nickname” the post. If you use more than one word, separate the words with dashes, like-this.

Post Status, for if you want to save a post as a draft or make it private.

Post Timestamp-this can be useful if you want to write a post but not have it publish right away. Just change the date and time on it.

WordPress Bookmarklet-Puts a small link on your browser toolbar, click it when you are reading a blog that you want to add to your blogroll.

Part Two: The Tabs across the Top

I’ve already explained the Dashboard and Write tabs, the Manage tab is where you can make changes to posts, pages, uploads, and categories, and where you can import in data or export it out.

Comments is handy if you know someone left you a comment but you can’t remember which post it is on. Blogroll is where you add in all the URLs that will show up once you drag the Links widget into your sidebar.

The Presentation tab is one you should get to know right away, because it has all of your options for easy customization of your blog. The first thing you should do is pick a new theme. Why? Because the default theme is boring!

Go to the Presentation tab and you will see another row of tabs, one of them is called Themes. Your current theme will be showing, and under that is all the available themes. I recommend using one of these to start, because they have already been tested as compatible with WordPress. Switching your theme is as easy as clicking the one that you like!

The Users tab- if you write a community blog, you’ll manage the users of your blog here, also, there is a Your Profile section for your photo and personal information.

Options- Your blog’s title and tagline, your email address, and your choice for the date format.

Upgrades- Custom CSS, unlimited Users, and extra directory space, for sale.

So that’s your Dashboard!