In the previous post, we learned how to register a WordPress blog. (Here’s why WordPress is the preferred platform for your blog.) In this post, we are going to familiarize ourselves with the WordPress Dashboard. Although, the images used in this post were taken for a hosted WordPress blog (not a WordPress.com blog),  the Dashboard of both platforms are very similar. You can follow the tutorial below using either platform.

Moving on, it is important to be familiar with WordPress environment – the Dashboard (Figure 1) – something like the “command and control center” of your blog or website. The Right Now panel contains the number of Posts, Pages, Categories, Tags, and Discussion (a snapshot of your blog’s Comments section). The QuickPress panel will enable us to publish short posts quickly. In the left-hand side of your Dashboard are the sections and their subsections.

You could also see other “panels” in your Dashboard. They include Recent Comments, Recent Drafts, Site Stats, etc. Do not be overwhelmed by these panels; we will use each of them as we go on. For now, we will concentrate on the basics. At this point, it’s important to be familiarized with the environment.

As a sample post, we will show the step-by-step posting of one of our partner blog’s articles (written by yours truly), which is about the recent doodle of Google (Figure 2). This article has an image and some hyperlinks to other articles in the web, so it’s a nice example because we can also show you here how to include an image in your post as well as add hyperlinks in your article. Continue reading →