The WordPress Dashboard is where a lot of the flexibility and management of your website takes place. I am not going to go into each option on the dashboard, but there a few things you need to know and set up from the beginning. I recently wrote a post on the WordPress dashboard covered how you add a new post, and how to publish it. I hope that you have been working on getting some content on your site.
Lets start the tour with “Pages.”
The section entitled Pages is pretty self explanatory. You add new pages in the same way you add new posts. In the beginning, you will decide what pages you want on your site. Websites come with the home page set, and some of them have an about page set up as well. Other pages you create depend on your business. Are you offering a service that has a set package price? Here is an example of another static page, a sales page, and although you can make changes to it occassionally, it won’t change on a daily basis, so you would create a page rather than a post. You can make a contact page, it also will probably not be changed on a regular basis. Those are a couple of examples of when you use pages. There are lots of choices, and you get to decide. Just remember that your pages are listed in the navigation bar across the top, so you don’t want to make too many visable pages.
“Comments” are pretty straight forward and easy to understand
Screenshot of WordPress menu the comments section
The comment section is simple to understand, but it is important to recognize the value it adds to your website. Some of the really incredible benefit to building a WordPress website is the ability for your visitors to leave comments or ask questions. That changes your site from a static site that simply sells a product or information to an place where your customers can engage and interact with you. It gets even better because others can join in the conversation too.
When there is a conversation taking place, it draws attention, and attention equates to traffic and the possibility of a sale. Having the conversation gives your reader the chance to get to know you, and what you have expertise in. It also is the start of building a relationship. The more frequent a visitor comes to your site, the more they begin to trust you.
The whole idea of the conversation is what the whole Social Media revolution is about. It gives a voice to everyone. It opens up the playing field for everyone to speak their mind. If you have a great product paired with equally great customer service, letting your satisfied customers share their experience with potential clients is a powerful marketing tool. It forces businesses to stay on their toes and listen to their customers. In my opinion, that is what it is all about.
I am not arrogant enough to think that I will never get a negative review. I don’t think anyone can be everything to all people. The hope that I have is that by allowing a dissatisfied customer to tell me how I did not live up to their expectations will help me improve my products or service. Letting a customer air their frustration also presents an opportunity to remedy the probem and maybe even change a negative experience into a positive one.
Appearance is the next stopping point.
One of the options is background. This is the area surrounding your actual website. You can change that color under appearance. You can select “backgrounds” and then put the number of the color of your choice in the blank following the color choice.
That brings us to “pluggins”
Pluggins are a pretty big deal, and I will devote an entire blog to them. Since I am a nice gal, I won’t make you wait too long, and for today I will tell you a little about them. Pluggins are code that can be added to your website to add different functions to your site. There is a lot of talk about pluggins, and the general feeling as far as I can tell is that they are great, but you shouldn’t go overboard. When you decide to ad pluggins, take it slowly. Sometimes pluggins can cause problems with WordPress, so add them one at a time and wait a couple of days before you add the next one.
For now that is all I am going to say about them, but soon I will cover this in a lot more detail. I do have to tell you that there are many many pluggins, and I will only talk about the ones I have experience with. What you need to understand is that they add huge flexibility to your blog.
Taking a look at the menu “settings”
I know if you are looking at the menu, you are wondering why I am skipping “tools”. Basically, I would recommend that until you are proficient, you leave the tools set at the default settings.
That takes us to settings and I am only going to cover a couple for these for now. One of the first things you might want to do when you install WordPress is go to the settings section and open up “general”. This is where initially you will change the name of your blog from the “Hello World” template to inserting the name of your blog. See the screen shot below. It does not show all the settings, but it does show the ones you need to change. You fill in the name of your blog and your tagline.
There are other settings on that page, they are pretty self explanatory.
Skipping down to the “permalinks” .
I have skipped over some of the other settings for now to get to the last one that is pretty important for you to set up properly. It is the permalink setting. It is a little hard to just explain, so I will follow this up with a short video. Basically as simply as I can explain it to you, this will make the links to your blog much simpler and descriptive. If you don’t choose to set up a custom link, the link will have numbers and characters that don’t make sense to the casual user. Setting up the custom option will have the name of each post or page in the link. Here is a screenshot of the part you need to change on your permalink section.
Lets start the tour with “Pages.”
The section entitled Pages is pretty self explanatory. You add new pages in the same way you add new posts. In the beginning, you will decide what pages you want on your site. Websites come with the home page set, and some of them have an about page set up as well. Other pages you create depend on your business. Are you offering a service that has a set package price? Here is an example of another static page, a sales page, and although you can make changes to it occassionally, it won’t change on a daily basis, so you would create a page rather than a post. You can make a contact page, it also will probably not be changed on a regular basis. Those are a couple of examples of when you use pages. There are lots of choices, and you get to decide. Just remember that your pages are listed in the navigation bar across the top, so you don’t want to make too many visable pages.
“Comments” are pretty straight forward and easy to understand
Screenshot of WordPress menu the comments section
The comment section is simple to understand, but it is important to recognize the value it adds to your website. Some of the really incredible benefit to building a WordPress website is the ability for your visitors to leave comments or ask questions. That changes your site from a static site that simply sells a product or information to an place where your customers can engage and interact with you. It gets even better because others can join in the conversation too.
When there is a conversation taking place, it draws attention, and attention equates to traffic and the possibility of a sale. Having the conversation gives your reader the chance to get to know you, and what you have expertise in. It also is the start of building a relationship. The more frequent a visitor comes to your site, the more they begin to trust you.
The whole idea of the conversation is what the whole Social Media revolution is about. It gives a voice to everyone. It opens up the playing field for everyone to speak their mind. If you have a great product paired with equally great customer service, letting your satisfied customers share their experience with potential clients is a powerful marketing tool. It forces businesses to stay on their toes and listen to their customers. In my opinion, that is what it is all about.
I am not arrogant enough to think that I will never get a negative review. I don’t think anyone can be everything to all people. The hope that I have is that by allowing a dissatisfied customer to tell me how I did not live up to their expectations will help me improve my products or service. Letting a customer air their frustration also presents an opportunity to remedy the probem and maybe even change a negative experience into a positive one.
Appearance is the next stopping point.
One of the options is background. This is the area surrounding your actual website. You can change that color under appearance. You can select “backgrounds” and then put the number of the color of your choice in the blank following the color choice.
That brings us to “pluggins”
Pluggins are a pretty big deal, and I will devote an entire blog to them. Since I am a nice gal, I won’t make you wait too long, and for today I will tell you a little about them. Pluggins are code that can be added to your website to add different functions to your site. There is a lot of talk about pluggins, and the general feeling as far as I can tell is that they are great, but you shouldn’t go overboard. When you decide to ad pluggins, take it slowly. Sometimes pluggins can cause problems with WordPress, so add them one at a time and wait a couple of days before you add the next one.
For now that is all I am going to say about them, but soon I will cover this in a lot more detail. I do have to tell you that there are many many pluggins, and I will only talk about the ones I have experience with. What you need to understand is that they add huge flexibility to your blog.
Taking a look at the menu “settings”
I know if you are looking at the menu, you are wondering why I am skipping “tools”. Basically, I would recommend that until you are proficient, you leave the tools set at the default settings.
That takes us to settings and I am only going to cover a couple for these for now. One of the first things you might want to do when you install WordPress is go to the settings section and open up “general”. This is where initially you will change the name of your blog from the “Hello World” template to inserting the name of your blog. See the screen shot below. It does not show all the settings, but it does show the ones you need to change. You fill in the name of your blog and your tagline.
There are other settings on that page, they are pretty self explanatory.
Skipping down to the “permalinks” .
I have skipped over some of the other settings for now to get to the last one that is pretty important for you to set up properly. It is the permalink setting. It is a little hard to just explain, so I will follow this up with a short video. Basically as simply as I can explain it to you, this will make the links to your blog much simpler and descriptive. If you don’t choose to set up a custom link, the link will have numbers and characters that don’t make sense to the casual user. Setting up the custom option will have the name of each post or page in the link. Here is a screenshot of the part you need to change on your permalink section.
