Logging in and changing your password

After completing the installation of your blog you are given your username (‘admin’) and a randomly assigned password. It is unlikely that you will remember this password so the best thing to do is to copy the password field and click on the login button (the password will also have been sent to the email address you gave in the previous screen). You’ll then be able to enter the username and paste in the password:

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Once you log in you will be given a warning that your password has been randomly assigned and that it would be wise to change it. Just click on the link to do so:

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Clicking the link will take you to your profile page. Enter a new password and repeat it below. Your password will be graded as to how secure it is, I have chosen a weak one for simplicity, but you should really try to choose a secure one – using numbers, letters and symbols will help it be more secure:

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Once you are happy with your selected password click ‘Update Profile’.

Now that you have changed your password you can start to familiarise yourself with WordPress.

Introducing the basics

Each time you login to WordPress you will be faced with your ‘Dashboard’. To get back to it after you have updated your password simply click on the link towards the top left of the screen:

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Your Dashboard

The first thing you might notice is that a newer version of WordPress is available. You can upgrade to it by clicking the link provided. It is normally recommended that you back up the blog first, but the automated upgrade process normally runs smoothly, and as we currently haven’t added any content then we can probably just upgrade without backing up:

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Once you have completed the upgrade you can return to the Dashboard and the message will have gone – until the next time an upgrade is available. As soon as you start adding content it is vital to backup your blog regularly, especially if you intend to upgrade to new versions of WordPress. Backing up your blog is covered in a later guide and is very quick and simple.

The next thing you’ll probably notice is that there is lots of information being displayed on the Dashboard page.

Under ‘Right now’ you can see:

• How many posts your blog has
• How many pages
• How many categories
• How many tags
• How many comments – and whether they have been approved, marked as spam or are pending your approval

You also have a box labelled ‘Quick Press’, this enables you to write and publish a quick post, but you won’t have as many options or tools available as when you write a post through the ‘Add post’ option. We’ll ignore ‘Quick Press’ for now and the rest of the Dashboard is quite self-explanatory and not relevant at this moment.

Your Blog

If you open a new tab and load your actual blog you should see the following:

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This is the standard blog theme, with standard content added to give you an idea of how it all looks. There is one blog post, one blog page and a couple of menus on the right hand side.

We need to now make things are own by getting rid of this generic information and replacing it with our content.

Click back to your Dashboard, but leave your blog page open in a separate window. This allows you to check how your changes are affecting your blog.

Changing your ‘tagline’

As you have probably noticed, the tagline for your blog – that is the snappy line that normally appears underneath your blog title – simply states that it is ‘just another WordPress weblog’. Of course, it isn’t, this is your blog, so the tagline needs to be changed.

To do this click on settings and it should default to ‘General’ settings page:

Here you can make a number of changes, but most importantly here you can change your tagline:

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Once you are happy with your tagline you can click ‘Save Changes’ and your blog will now be updated. You can refresh your blog to show this change:

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Changing / Adding a page

Every good blog should have an ‘about’ page that tells your readers a little bit about what the blog is about, perhaps who it is written by and even who it is written for. You can put as little or as much information on this page as you wish.

As you can see from the ‘Pages’ menu of your blog, WordPress has already generated a content page that you can customise. You can update this page by clicking on the pages link on the dashboard:

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You will then be shown all of your current pages:

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This view will allow you to edit, update or delete any pages that you create. We only have one existing page, so hover over it to be given the options:

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‘Edit’ gives you the full options for editing a page, whereas ‘Quick Edit’ gives you a cut-down version. Here we will click on ‘Edit’ to see the following screen:

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It is quite simple to use. You can see the text that has already been inputted, simply delete this and replace it with your own text. To make these changes permanent simply click ‘Update’ (blue button, right hand side).

All of the other settings you can leave as default as they are fine for most purposes. Once you have entered your own text and clicked ‘Update’ you can then go back to your blog and check out your updated ‘About’ page:

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Adding a page is just as simple and quick. Simply click on ‘Add New’ under the pages tab:

You can add a title, insert some text as before and either save a draft to be worked on later or publish the page immediately:

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If you click ‘Publish’ it will automatically be added to your ‘Pages’ menu on your blog. You can refresh your blog and it should appear. Simply click on the link to ‘Contact me’ and you’ll see your new page appear.

Editing / Adding a post

A WordPress page is designed to be used for content that you always want to link to. So, an about page, contact page and a rules page for comments for example are the type of thing you would use a page for.

A post on the other hand is what you create each time you want to update your blog. Posts are published in date order, with your latest post appearing at the top of your blog and the oldest and the bottom – which will become many pages down once you have a bit of content. Posts automatically appear in your blog archive, which is divided into months and then years. People can browse your archive freely and new readers can scroll back through older posts if they like what you are writing.

We currently have one example post that has been created by WordPress. We have two choices, we can either delete it and add a new first post, or we can edit it so that it becomes our first post. Either way you need to open up the ‘Post’ tab and select edit:

This screen is the same as editing a page, so either delete ‘Hello world!’ and add a new post, or simply edit ‘Hello World!’ so that it becomes your first post.

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Once you have changed / created the title and content you will see a number of options that do not appear when you are creating a page. Firstly, each post needs to be assigned to a category or categories. You can create these categories as you go along, so no need to worry about making loads of categories up.

In my example the post I have written is about how the blog is currently under construction. The category I could create to fit this would be something like ‘blog news’ or ‘admin message’.

Currently the post is ‘Uncategorised’. To add a new category simply click the link to do so:

You can add and select as many categories as you like, here this blog post matches both categories that I have created, so it makes sense to put it in both. This helps users find content on your blog, if they are searching either category they will find this post.

Your new categories

Once you have saved the changes to your post you can refresh the blog to see what it looks like:

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Already it is taking shape and we can see what WordPress does with the content we add.

First of all, the Archive reflects the content so far; secondly, the categories have been updated to show how many posts are under each one and the details underneath the post also reflect the categories that the post has been filed under.

We can now look at creating our own ‘Blogroll’, removing the example comment and then we’ll be ready to pick a different theme and really start to experiment with our new blog.

Creating a Blogroll

A ‘Blogroll’ is a list of blogs that you like and read. They may be similar to your blog, they may be about entirely different things. It doesn’t really matter, they can all go on your blogroll (and you can create different blogrolls for different categories later if you wish).

As you can see, you already have a blogroll that links to useful sites about WordPress. As before, we can delete these links and replace them with some of our own.

To do this we must first open up the ‘Links’ tab and then click on ‘Edit’:

Once you do that you will see the following screen, and it becomes quite clear how links are organised by WordPress for your convenience:

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Links are given a name, which is what will appear on your blogroll, the url is the address of the website that the link points at and the category of the link determines whether it appears in your blogroll, or under a different link menu. All of the current links appear under the category ‘blogroll’.

You can delete all of these links and replace them with new ones – you should be able to do this without guidance now, because WordPress works the same way whether it is dealing with Pages, posts or links – or you can edit them so that they become your own links.

Once you have added some links to your blogroll you can refresh your blog and the updated blogroll will appear.

You should also be able to delete the example comment and the blog will then be completely ready for you to start blogging. You may want to read further guides on changing your theme before launching your blog.