There are two parts of your site: what the public sees and what you see as an administrator.

Through the Dashboard, you add new posts, new pages, and manage virtually any aspect of your WordPress site.

How Do I Log In?

Log in with the user name and password you created when you set up your WordPress installation.

The WordPress Dashboard

The Dashboard is the control panel that helps you create your WordPress site. Follow the instructions below to customize the site and learn your way around.

1. Log in to your WordPress site.
2. Click Users and select Add New.
3. Supply the required information.
4. Select Administrator from the Role field. Selecting Administrator lets you to log in to the backend with that user name as well.
5. Click Add User.

This new user can log in to the backend and modify all of the site's settings.

To Delete the Default Hello World Post

WordPress creates a default post when it is installed. Now is a good time to delete the Hello world post!

1. Click Posts and select Edit.
2. Place the mouse cursor over Hello world! and a link menu displays.
3. Click Delete.

To Change the Blog Title and Tagline

When you first saw your site, its title was WordPress and its tagline was Just another WordPress weblog. You can personalise that to make it fit your blog's purpose.

1. Click Settings.
2. In the Blog Title field, enter your new blog title.
3. In the Tagline field, enter your new tagline.
4. Review the remaining fields and update as necessary. Seehttp://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_General_SubPanel for more information.
5. Click Save Changes when finished.

To Create Your First Blog Post

By default, WordPress displays your new posts on the home page in reverse chronological order. You can blog about anything, but successful blogs focus on a few topics and cover them well.

1. Click Post and select Add New.
2. Enter a title and then click in the body field to type the blog post.
3. Modify other settings as necessary, check out http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts for more information.
4. Click Publish to make your post live.

To Create a New Page

Pages are like posts, but they aren't included in the chronology of the rest of your blog posts. What that means, is that pages can be static (never change) and aren't dated or have time stamps like your blog posts. Pages are great for "About Me" pages or contact forms. See http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages for more information about pages.

1. Click Pages and select Add New.
2. Enter a title and then click in the body field to begin typing the content of the page.
3. In the Attributes area, specify whether you want the page to display as main page or as a child of another page.
4. Click Publish.

If you create a page you don't like, you can delete or modify it from the Pages menu.

Changing the Look and Feel of Your Site

When you choose WordPress, you enter an Open Source community. The community 'extends' the existing feature set with new themes and new plugins among other things.

Themes dramatically alter the look and feel of your site. You can view and download themes from WordPress's site at (http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/).

Plugins can help you track stats, improve the performance of your site, optimize your site for search engines, and much more. Check out the available plugins on WordPress's site http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/.

Uploading Themes and Plugins

You can use an FTP client to upload themes and plugins to the correct folder. We also provide an FTP File Manager in our DirectAdmin Control Panel that allows you to upload .zip files and unarchive them on the server. This saves you the time of unarchiving them on your local computer and then having to create a folder on your hosting account. Use an FTP client to upload themes or plugins that are greater than 20MB in size.

After performing these steps, you can log into the backend of your WordPress site and click Appearance to modify your theme, or Plugins to activate your plugins.