Wordpress out of the Box
Whichever way you have installed WordPress, logging into your new site for the first time can be a daunting process. At a glance there’s an awful lot going on! Helpfully, the most recent version will display a handy Getting Started guide, to help you adjust the website’s presentation and add content.
Dashboard
The dashboard is the control centre of your site that shown above. It can be accessed at any time by clicking the link that we have highlighted in blue.
Next, we have two groups of links in the menu on the left-hand side. In red are the areas for creating and uploading content, whilst in green are the more administrative areas like site settings, appearance and Plugins, we’ll get to these in next few post. In yellow you’ll find, amongst other things, a direct link to the front end of your site.
Posts and Pages
These are the main ways to generate content on your site. By default, posts will display in a continuous list on the home page of your site whilst pages will be displayed separately and accessed via a menu or similar navigation. The procedure for adding either is actually almost the same, so let’s have a look at the interface for adding them shown above.
From the section we have highlighted in red, go to either Posts > Add New or Pages > Add New. This will
take you to an edit screen for adding a post or page – they are both quite similar.
Enter a title for your post or page, and then move straight on to adding the content. This takes place in the large text area in the middle and will be familiar to anyone who has written an email with a webmail provider such as Gmail.
The Toolbar along the top allows you to format text and insert hyperlinks. Above this the “Upload/Insert” link allows you to add images, audio or videos. In this respect authoring a web page has been made as simple as possible. You’ll notice that at the top right of the text area is a tab that switches from “Visual” to “HTML”, enabling more advanced pages and posts to be created.
Once you have finished editing your post or page, you must click “Publish” – the blue button on the top right – to save your work and make it live. Before going live you may also wish to save a draft and return to finish it later, or preview your work in a new browser tab or window.
You’ll notice that there are additional options such as “Categories” and “Tags”. These can be used to organize your content further down the line; for now we’ll skip them but we’ll revisit them in next few post.
Viewing your content on your website
To view your site either click the “Visit Site” link in the top left of the window or type your domain name into the address bar.
In its current configuration, new posts will appear one after the other on the home page of the site, and pages will appear as links in the black menu bar that runs along the middle under the header image.
So that’s all worked very nicely. But what if you’d like to break away from the crowd and make your site reflect your own flawless personality and perfect looks? In the next few post we will take a comprehensive look at using WordPress to manage the content of a website.
Read Next - Introduction on Wordpress - Part 4
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