WordPress is an excellent website publishing tool, however if you're not familiar with 'blogging' terminology you may struggle to start with. The purpose of this guide is to provide a basic understanding of how to use the WordPress tool, and how to carry out basic tasks.

Logging In

To login to WordPress go to:

• www.wordpress.com

This will display the following page, where you'll need to enter your username and password:

Once you have successfully entered this information and clicked the 'Login' button you will see this page change, and some additional options appear at the top. The main area to focus on now is the top left-hand side of the screen…

Clicking the 'My Dashboard' link will take you to the main administration page, where you will see:

• The title of the site you are administering
• The administration navigation options
• Shortcuts to popular tasks

This is a screenshot of the 'dashboard' home page…

Shortcuts

The administration shortcuts offer quick access to popular tasks. These are:

• Write a post – Write a new blog post to add 'latest' information to the site
• Update profile – Change personal and website descriptive information
• Add a link – Add a link to the 'links' area of the site
• Change your sites look or theme – Change the appearance of the site

Because most sites will already have been configured to contain the most effective profile and to have the best apperance, the most common shortcuts you are likely to use are the 'write a post' and 'add a link' options. For anything other than this it's necessary to use the main administration options, listed below.

Administration Options

The administration options under the main navigation can be split in to 2 distinct types:

• Site content tools
• Site administration tool

These break down as follows:

Site content tools…

• Write
• Manage
• Bookmarks

Site admin tools…

• Presentation
• Users
• Options
• Import

Here is a bit more informatioon about what each of them does.

Dashboard – The admin tool home page link.
Write – Allows you to write a new post or create a new page, so this is effectively to add new content to the site.
Manage – Allows you to manage existing posts and pages, as well as manage the site categories and manage comments made against your posts. This is therefore to change existing content.
Bookmarks – Blog speak for 'links', so here you can change existing or add new links to your site.
Presentation – Allows you to change the design theme and side-bar display options.

Users – Allows you to change your personal information, and add additional users to be able to add content to your site, as subscribers, authors, editors or administrators.

Options – General site options, such as the site title, language, email address etc.

Import – Allows you to import content from another blog engine – e.g. Blogger

The main options that a website owner will use are:

• Write
• Manage
• Bookmarks

WordPress also provides an excellent 'Frequently Asked Questions' and a user forum, where answers to most support problems can be found simply by using the search option. Links to these facilities are as follows:

• FAQs – http://faq.wordpress.com/
• Forum – http://wordpress.com/forums/
• Documentation – http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page

Important things to remember…

• Posts and pages must be published before they will appear on the site
• Links must be assigned to a category for them to appear on the site