In this latest guide, we’ll be looking at and helping you navigate through your WordPress admin dashboard.
We’ll run through the key areas of a WordPress back office, namely: Posts, Pages & Menus, so that you should have a grounding in managing the content on your website.
Let us begin.
The dashboard itself #
Once you’ve successfully logged in to your admin dashboard, you will be faced with a webpage looking similar to this:
The left hand column with a black background contains pretty much all the menu items (and sub menu items) of the site. There is a black bar along the top that also contains extra menu items – but we can leave that out for now.
Hovering over the menu items on the left will render sub menu items.
It’s worth noting, although you can access your admin panel via a mobile, for ease of use it’s recommended accessing with a laptop or desktop. That’s what we’ll be showing screenshots of throughout our guides.
The key areas #
While each section has its own use, we’ll be looking at the most fundamental sections you’ll need for running and managing a WordPress website.
Posts #
The ‘Posts’ section refers to the site’s in built blogging platform.
Here you can add, edit, archive and delete blog posts.
You can also add, amend and delete categories & tags which are designed for sorting/ organising your posts.
We’ve written an in-depth article on managing your website’s posts here, where we go into detail about how to actually make changes and amends.
Pages #
‘Pages’ refers to static pages within the website. These are typically pages that won’t change too often and are the “core” of a website.
Examples of such pages are:
- About us
- Contact us
- Our Services
- Privacy Policy etc.
You can learn about creating and managing your website’s pages in our guide here.
Menus #
The ‘Menus’ is the final item on the list for today.
Why is ‘menus’ important? Because once you’ve created or amended your content (posts & pages) you’ll need to be able to easily showcase it!
‘Menus’ is exactly what it says on the tin, it allows you to add and remove the navigational menu items on your website. It effects your websites front-end (what your visitors see) menu.
We go into detail about managing your website’s menus here.
Other sections #
In the not too distant future we’ll take a look at the other sections of WordPress and how you can utilise them, but as this article is labelled ‘beginner’, we’ll leave it there.