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How to Set Up Your WordPress Blog – Discover Your WordPress Dashboard and Start Blogging

By Elisabeth Kuhn

So you have installed WordPress. Now what? Read on to discover how to orient yourself in your new blog’s back office and start blogging.

First of all, you need to find your blog. It’s easy. Just type in your chosen domain name, and if you have installed it on a subdirectory, add that extension, i.e., /blog.

You’ll now see your new blog, which is blue and says “Hello World.” That’s what they all say when they’re fresh out of the box.

But it won’t stay that way for long…

How do you get into your back office to customize your blog?

You type your domain name back into the browser, but this time, you’ll add /wp-admin. If you have installed it on a subdirectory, add the /wp-admin after the subdirectory.

Now you need to log in. And, then you will be taken back to your blog’s back office, also known as the dashboard.

The dashboard has all kinds of interesting items. Along the left hand side, there are some icons lined up, plus some labels.

Try to hover over them to find out what they all stand for. The most important ones right now are for posts, which is the icon that looks like a thumb tack.

So, you have an icon for posts, one for media, one for links, one for pages, and more for comments, appearance, plug-ins, users, tools and settings. And all of these are really useful.

Then, in the middle of the dashboard area, it says dashboard on top, along with “at a glance.” This tells you how many posts you have, how many pages, how many categories, and so on.

Underneath it, it has the comment section, and on the right hand side, you have some more administrative tools.

The exact configuration may change slightly, depending on which version of WordPress you have installed, but basically you’ll have all of this in one form or another. You may just have to look around for it.

It also varies a little bit depending on the theme you have, because not all themes have the same ingredients (though most of them do).

You’ll want to get a new theme soon, but the first order of the agenda is to fix the settings and then to start posting.

Go to the first post, which is “Hello World” and either edit it to say what YOU want to say, or delete it and start a new post of your own.

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