WordPress® For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 7. Understanding the WordPress.org Dashboard

In This Chapter

• Signing in to the Dashboard

• Finding your way around the Dashboard

• Customizing the Dashboard

• Applying your own settings

• Personalizing your profile

• Deciding how your blog will look

With WordPress.org successfully installed, you can explore your new blogging software. This chapter guides you through the preliminary setup of your new WordPress blog using the Dashboard. When you blog with WordPress, you spend a lot of time in the Dashboard, which is where you make all the exciting, behind-the-scenes stuff happen. In this panel, you find all the settings and options that enable you to set up your blog just the way you want it. (If you still need to install and configure WordPress, check out Chapter 6.)

Feeling comfortable with the Dashboard sets you up for successful entrance into the WordPress blogging world. You will tweak your WordPress settings several times throughout the life of your blog. In this chapter, as I go through the various sections, settings, options, and configurations available to you, understand that nothing is set in stone. You can set options today and change them at any time.

Logging In to the Dashboard

I find that the direct approach (also known as jumping in) works best when I want to get familiar with a new software tool. To that end, just follow these steps to log in to WordPress and take a look at the guts of the Dashboard:

1. Open your Web browser, and type the WordPress login-page address (or URL) in ...