WordPress: Understanding the Dashboard

After you log in, your first stop is the Dashboard of your site. As you walk through each of the steps, begin to make notes about the stories you want to tell. Are you going to share fun stories about your family life? Do you have insights from God’s Word you need to tell? Have you struggled through a hard season and now want to be a comfort to others?

Your site name is in the upper left corner.  Clicking on your site name will take you to the home page.  In the far right corner, you’ll see that you are identified as the logged in user.

The Screen Option box just below your user name can be an important place to remember.  When you click on this box, a list of items that could or could not appear in the Work Area for a particular Administrative Screen appears.  Each Screen may have a different set of options.  You can see the differences in the examples below.  For your Add New Post Screen, I recommend that you check all the boxes.  It will save you some stress further down the road.

This is the Screen Option box for the New Post Screen:

This is the Screen Option box for the Users Screen:

The Main Navigation Menu is along with left side of the page.  For most of the menu items, hovering over the text will cause the sub-menu to expand to the right and clicking on the text will cause the sub-menu to appear below.

The area in the center of the screen is called the Work Area.

We will visit each of the items in the Navigation Menu in the days ahead.