Now you have a WordPress installation for your own Web site whether it's through server press or through
your own hosting.
The first thing that opens up is this welcome mat and if you want WordPress can help guide you through
building your own web site.
But for those of you in this class you probably don't need any help because that's what I'm here for.
So just click the I don't need help button.
This is your home page.
This is the dashboard of wordpress.
And in this video I just want to quickly go over the main menu and help you navigate getting around
WordPress.
You can see on the left hand side a menu with different options right now are highlighted on the dashboard.
And that's because were on the dashboard.
There's a lot of things happening right now.
And when you first install WordPress a lot of things are going to be needed to be updated or installed
because with the latest versions of Wordpress depending on who you're hosting with they will already
come pre-installed with certain plug ins or with certain tools.
For example with blue us we already have this blue host this marketplace option things you might not
see if you're using server press contact form opt in Monster.
These are plug ins that are pre-installed.
When we installed via blue host Don't worry if you don't see these dots that's OK.
The main things you need to know are the dashboard This is your home page.
We're going to learn how to customize it and really dive into what you can do on your home page in a
future lesson going down the left hand menu.
We have this first plug in.
It's kind of an all star plug in called jet pack.
And this comes with a ton of cool tools.
We're going to be going over all the different plug ins and tools that I recommend in a later section
below that we have our posts.
Now when you hover over some of these menu items a different sub menu pops up.
So for example under posts you can click all post to view all of the posts you've written in posts.
Think of posts as your articles or your blog posts.
You can click add new or you can see your categories and tags media.
This is all of your uploads such as photos or files that you upload pages.
These are all the pages of your website.
Again you see the sub menu where you can view all pages or you can click add new to add a new page.
I'm going to skip over a contact form because that's only for this install of wordpress.
You have comments so if you have comments on your Web site you can moderate them their appearance.
This is a very important one where you were going to customize your theme your menus what everything
looks like and we're going to be diving into this in the next lesson including installing and finding
a new theme.
Plug ins are all kinds of tools that you can install for your website.
Doing everything from commenting security contact form social media sharing SEO all kinds of things
happen with the plugins users.
You can add users to your Web site if you want to have other authors or other people who help with their
web site.
That's in this user manual tools.
This is another menu that when you do install certain plugins you might actually have more tools appear
under this menu and then same with settings where we have some basic settings for how our Web site works
in terms of which page is the home page vs the blog page.
If comments appear are not different things that we'll be covering in the rest of this course up at
the very top you have our site title which we didn't edit when we installed WordPress via blue host.
But we're going to edit that in a moment.
And if you want to view your site you can just click this view site button.
Then you have these different icons up here.
Some refer to the comments if you have any comments.
You have a new button if you want to easily and quickly add a new post page user or upload new media
and then for me I have this marketplace which is there because I downloaded via a blue host and so there's
different marketplace options.
So let me just click on that and I'll show you what it looks like.
So because I installed with blue hose blue host gives us all kinds of tools and things that we can use
right within our WordPress site.
We're not going to use this tool because I'm going to be showing you free tools and other plug ins that
I suggest using.
So back to our site I clicked visit site and it opened up this new tab and here is our website.
It's already up there live.
And if anyone goes to it you can see this.
Now at this point if you actually go to Aberdare designs dot com.
It might not be live.
I'm probably not going to publish it for the world to see but if you have created your website and you
share your link.
This is what it's going to look like.
Now WordPress has preinstalled a theme that I am using right now.
Each year WordPress comes out with a custom theme so this is the 20:17 theme.
But we're going to be looking into installing a new theme in the next lesson so that's the basic WordPress
layout.
The main thing when you log in is you'll appear on your dashboard.
And one other thing I'll mention is updates.
This is something you should do every time you log in go under dashboard to the updates to see if there
are any updates for your website.
This might include updates for plug ins for themes or for Wordpress itself.
Right now I'm using WordPress version point 7.2 but sometimes WordPress does get a facelift or some
sort of update that might have to do with security.
So you want to make sure that you're updating to the latest forms of your plug ins or themes or whatever.
So to do that you will click on whatever needs to be updated and then click Update plugins.
Now there are other ways to update individual plug ins via that plug in page but that's the easiest
way right from this update page.
Now I've updated that plug in that was already pre-installed and I have no more notifications for updates.
Cool so that's it for the dashboard right now in the next lesson.
I'm going to show you how to install a new theme.