Blogging for beginners, now that your blog is set up, let’s look at making your first post. In our earlier post, creating a blog, we looked at how to get a domain name and find the best host. We took you through all of the steps to get your site up and running with your wordpress software installed.
Now let’s take a look at where to go from here. First thing is first, let’s log into your admin panel. Your admin panel will be found at http://(yourdomainnamehere.com)/wp-admin. This should take you to a login page like this:
Blogging for beginners
Enter your username and password that you chose when setting up the blog and press continue. This will bring you to the main interface we will be using when creating a blog.
The dashboard is where you can get everything done that you want to. Down the left hand side is your basic navigation, allowing you to create posts, pages, change the theme, approve comments and much more. Out of the box, your blog will typically have the generic wordpress theme with a sample post, page and comment. To get familiar with how to get around in the dashboard, let’s look at how to take that content out and add your own.
Creating a blog
At the top of the navigation is a dropdown menu called posts. If you click on edit, it will bring you to a screen that shows one post, typically named “Hello World”. Clicking on that post title will bring you to a screen that allows you to edit it.
There are two options here, you can edit the post, or you can delete it and start from scratch. For our purposes here, let’s go ahead and edit that post.
There are two main boxes on this view, the title box and the body box. These boxes are simple text editors, so you can click in the box, delete the content and replace it with your own content. Let’s try replacing “Hello World” with “Welcome to my blog”. Next, in the body box, replace the content with something about you.
Don’t worry, we can change this later, we just want to get a feel for how to create our posts.
Once you have added some words, let’s look to the right. There are a few buttons to note, “save draft” “preview” and “publish”. These buttons pretty much do what they say. If you are creating a new post, but it is not complete and ready to be published, saving it as a draft will save it. To edit it later, simply go to the posts, edit tab and select your post.
Preview will allow you to see what your post will look like live on your site without publishing it. It is a handy button, especially when you start inserting videos, pictures and other items besides text. Once you are happy with how your post looks, publish is going to publish it to your page.
Go ahead and publish your post, then in the top left corner, click on visit site and take a look. Pretty easy, right? That is the basics that you need to know to get in and add posts. You can go to the posts menu and click add new to start adding posts right away.
There are many other options available on this screen that you may want to know about. We will cover them in detail in an upcoming post, so be sure to check back in!
