It’s really easy to feel dazed and confused when you are first faced with the WordPress Dashboard, there’s so much there!  Well, don’t be, this is what makes using WordPress great, lots of options so you don’t just have to end up with a boring inflexible blog but a slick looking website.

Here’s a brief introduction into the dashboard that will hopefully help you get started…

So you start with three columns there, the menu bar running along the left hand side, two columns with useful information about your WordPress site and also helpful updates about WordPress features.

Top left, this is an overview of your blog as it stands, pretty helpful but I’d suggest using the menu bar to make changes.

Top right you will see QuickPress, this is really handy if you know exactly what you want to post into your blog or want to make a quick draft to go back to later without faffing around, you can still add pictures/media here too.

So, onto the menu bar:

Posts:

• Edit – edit posts that you have already made whether they have been published or are waiting as a draft for you to finish off.
• New – takes you straight to a fresh new post where you can talk about what you like, add pictures (and other media) and either publish or save as a draft.
• Tags – these are words that are associated with the post you are writing at any one time, for example this post could use the tags dashboard, help and housekeeping.
• Categories – this is a way to group your blog posts, for example the categories for this post could use WordPress, tutorial and tips.

It’s best to have a think about what categories you’d like for your posts and keep them relevant to your site, both tags and categories will be really helpful to your readers especially as you fill your blog with lots of posts!

Media:

Here you go straight into the media library, this is where you can see any media you have posted to your site and also where you can add new. You’ll probably find that you will add media as you go when writing your posts and it will automatically find it’s way here.

Links:

WordPress has links in here when it is first installed so you’ll probably want to pop into here and have a sort out, maybe take these out if they’re not relevant to your site and add your own. Here’s a useful post that your blogmistress made for you to help you out on link categories Change your WordPress Blogroll name – video tutorial

Pages:

WordPress doesn’t limit you to just having a blog page, here you can add other pages, for instance you might like to have Home, About and Contact pages. It’s very easy here to add your pages here and edit these in a similar way to posting a blog entry.

Comments:

This is an easy place to manage comments made on your site, here you can can approve (or not!), reply to and edit. On the main dashboard page you will see if there are any comments that need to be looked at.

Appearance:

• Themes – You’ll go straight into Manage Themes when you click on Appearance, if this is a new WordPress install you’ll probably want to have a poke around for one that will suit your site. There are loads of free themes to choose from and we’re also putting together a useful post on how to add and manage themes!
• Widgets – This is where you manage your plugins that you can add into your sidebar, here’s our useful post on how to work with widgets – WordPress Widgets – What, Why, How
• Editor – An easy place to edit the main files for your template – but only do this if you are sure of what you are doing. Tinkering with these files isn’t advised unless you have made backups.
• Add New Themes – This will give you search options to narrow down the themes on offer.
• Custom Header – You’ll have the current header image displayed and can upload a new one to try with your theme, pretty handy!

Plugins:

• Installed – Here you will see a list of all plugins installed and whether active or inactive and also if they have upgrades available.
• Add New – This is pretty similar to the Add New Themes where you can search to see if a plugin you need is available.
• Editor – This is where it is far too easy to tinker with your plugin files, please only make changes here if you have backed up and happy to change these.

Users:

• Authors & Users – Lists the users that are registered with your site to subscribe/contribute.
• Add New – If you want others to contribute to your site you set them up here with various permissions to suit your needs.
• Your Profile – add and edit your user information here.

Tools:

In here you can use some of the useful tools that WordPress provides along with importing and exporting your blog and upgrade wordpress.

Settings:

Here you can manage your general settings for WordPress, just go through the options and change what you need to, it’s not too complicated and normally you don’t need to mess around in here too much. For example how you wish your blogs urls to be set go to permalinks, personally I pop /%postname%/ into custom structure, this displayes like this http://www.yoursite.co.uk/example-post

There you go, that’s a quick run through the WordPress Dashboard, hopefully helpful. Probably the best way to learn is have a play with the settings and also keep an eye on future posts here at blogmistress

Don’t worry about breaking your WordPress either, here’s a useful post – What to do when your WordPress breaks!

Related posts:

1. Handy WordPress Dashboard Notepad
2. What, Why, How – WordPress Plugins
3. How to add a new WordPress User