Using WordPress-Log in-Intro to the Dashboard-Appearance (themes)

To make any changes to your WordPress site after you’ve migrated your Live Space website to WordPress you’ll need to log in. From there, you can make changes such as choose a new theme, add a graphic to the top of your page, and add a new post to your site.

Log in

After the migration finishes, your site will come up. Scroll down and look on the right-hand side of the page until you find the Meta heading and under that you’ll see Log in. At this stage, this will be the same for all those who’ve migrated from Live Spaces since the migration process ends up giving us all the same WordPress template design, namely Twenty Ten. Later we’ll show you where to go to change your theme to one of many, many that are available.

Click this Log in link and you’ll be asked for your Username and Password. If you let the migration process proceed to the end, your username will be the first part of your former Live Spaces web address (e.g., webdotwiz, from webdotwiz.spaces.live.com) and your password will be what you used when WordPress asked you to enter during migration.

 

After successfully logging in, your WordPress Dashboard comes up. Think of the Dashboard as similar to Windows Control Panel – it’s where you change settings, adjust how things look including choosing another theme, change your password, and get lots of information about your WordPress site.

Top of page toolbar

Across the top of the page is a toolbar for quick access to various functions – the handy one to take note of at the moment is My Blog that enables you to return to your Dashboard from another section (such as the Appearance section).

Before going further, check for the amount of spam that your Live Spaces website may have accumulated over the past few years. One of the problems with Live Spaces was the amount of spam comments left on posts. For example, webDotWiz has nearly 300 spam comments (mostly tens of links to other sites hosted by spammers). If you’ve got lots, now’s the time to get rid of it.

WordPress uses Akismet to protect our WordPress site from spam and one way that works is that any comment left by a reader of our site is that we receive an email to confirm or deny that we’ll allow that comment to remain on our site. If you want to tidy up any spam, click the Spam link, a page lists all comments left on your site and you work through the list by ticking those comments you want to delete.

Add a new post from inside WordPress

When you want to add a post directly from WordPress, click on Posts in the left-hand column and a new page opens which on the left has the option to Add new or there’s a button alongside the Posts heading.

We’ll look at adding posts in more detail in a later post.

 

Appearance

Clicking Appearance on the left-hand column of your Dashboard takes you to a page headed Manage Themes that gives you a description and properties of the theme you’re currently using and enables you to view other themes that are available.

You’ll notice a number of options are available under Appearance including Header which enables you to change the graphic at the top of your site pages (assuming the theme has this functionality). The Twenty Ten theme does as you can see from the information under Current Theme.

Also on the Manage Themes page is where you can browse through all the available themes. You can browse by Random (automatically selected when you first open the page), A to Z, Popular and Recently added.

As you browse all the possibilities, bear in mind a couple of things: whether you want to be able to add a graphic or photo to the top of your pages (in other words, can you change the Header for a particular theme) and colour combinations (e.g., Will my site be easy to read?).

As an aside, the Twenty Ten theme may seem plain but the trend of web page designers is to use lots and lots of white space with a reasonably large font size for ease of reading.

Use the Preview link to see what a particular theme looks like and get a full description of its properties. Use Activate to see how your site will display. You can always change the current theme to another until you’re happy with your choice.

More to come

webDotWiz will post about the following as soon as he can:

• How to add a new post to your WordPress site (from within the WordPress Dashboard)
• How to change your WordPress password
• How to change who can view your WordPress site
• How to change your tagline (the sub-title at the top of your page).

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Windows Live Tags: WordPress, Blogs, Dashboard, Logging in, Themes

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Posted using Live Writer 2011.