At Geek Niche we use WordPress as the CMS (Content Management System) for a lot of our pre-built packages.  While WP is very simple to use–and requires no special coding skills–it does take a bit of time to learn what all the buttons and boxes do.

The Dashboard

The Dashboard

The Dashboard is where you land when you log into the administrative side of your site.  It gives you information about your site and other WP-related events (most of which you won’t care about).

The dashboard is divided into two main sections: the body and the sidebar.  The sidebar has links to all the tools you need to run your site.  Each of the grey boxes is a drop-down menu that has a list of specific tools underneath it.   For most situations, you’ll only be using 2 of the menu items: Pages and Posts.

In the body of the Dashboard, you will find a lot of information about your site.  A couple of the important ones are:

• Right Now This is a quick view of your site.  It tells you how many pages you have, how many posts you have, how many comments you have, how many of them are waiting for approval, and how many you’ve marked as spam.  It also lets you know what version of WordPress you’re using (this is information we may ask for when we’re trying to fix problems).
• Recent Drafts This is a list of pages and posts that you started writing and saved, but didn’t actually publish.  You can go  back to these and finish writing them.
• Incoming Links This is where WordPress goes out and looks to see where other people are linking back to your site.  It’s not the most accurate but it’s worth paying attention to.

Writing

Using Pages

Obviously, you’re going to want to create new pages for your site.  That’s simple.  In the sidebar, click the “Pages” button.   Two options will appear:  “Edit” and “Add New”.  You’ll also see a list of all your existing pages appear.   The list will tell you the title, who wrote the page, when it was written, how many comments it has, and other information.

To create a new page, click on “Add New” in the Sidebar.    You’ll get a page that looks like this:

Add New Page

• The “Kitchen Sink” button shows/hides the 2nd line of buttons.
• Page Title is what will show up as the name of the page on your website.  I recommend keeping the names short and to-the-point.  “Menu”, “Contact”, “Services”, or other one-word titles keep your navigation menu looking clean (we’ll talk about “parent pages” and “child pages” in another tutorial).
• Write out whatever you want in the text window. This is what shows up on your website.  Use the buttons on the toolbar to format the text (bold, italic, bullet points, etc.)  You can expand the window by clicking and dragging on the bottom right corner.
• When you’re done writing the page, click the “Publish” button.  This adds the page to your website.  If you’re not ready for it to be published (you’re only half-way done) you can click the “Save Draft” button.  This will save the page, but not publish it.  You can come back and finish writing it later.

Editing Pages

Editing Pages

To edit an existing page, go to the sidebar and click “Edit”.  Again, you’ll see a list of existing pages.  If you click on the name of the page, the editing screen will come up.  Inside the editing box, you’ll see your page.  It may look a little different than it does out on your website.  That’s okay.  Your actual website has come special code that makes things look appropriate and those rules don’t always show up in the editing window.

Go ahead and make any changes you want to.  After you’ve made the changes, click the “Update Page” button.  That will add the changes to your website.  They won’t show up until you click that button.

WordPress automatically saves your work every 10  minutes.  If your computer crashes or you mess things up, you can go back to any previously saved version by clicking on it in the list below the editing window.

That’s all it takes to create and edit pages on your website.  Later tutorials will discuss other/more advanced topics.