Introduction

Welcome to the exciting world of websites! If you’re reading this, then that probably means your website is live and ready for you to customise. In this guide, I’ll walk you through the initial steps of customizing your site to make it uniquely yours.

Logging In

• Navigate to your website’s login page (usually www.yourwebsite.com/wp-admin).
• Enter the username and password provided.
• Click “Log In” to access your WordPress Dashboard.

Understanding the WordPress Dashboard

Home/Dashboard

This is the first page you will see when you log into your WordPress dashboard. It should contain a few boxes containing useful information.

In the first box, you will find links to useful guides to do with managing your website. The second box will have a link to where you can view all your outstanding invoices and how to pay them. The third box will give you a useful overview of all of your site’s statistics. Sometimes, you might see a fourth box, if so, this will contain information about your contact form or any other forms you might have on your website.

Media

The Media page is the next page down the left hand navigation pan, it contains all the media files (images, videos and audio files) that you have uploaded onto your site. It also allows you to upload new media onto your site, see below.

In order to upload new media to the site, all you need to do is press on the “Add New Media File” button at the top next to the “Media Library” title. Then you can either drag and drop a file into the box which appears, or you can click on “Select Files” to open up the file explorer and select a file which you wish to upload.

Pages

The Pages page is probably one of the most important pages for you. It contains a list of all the pages on your site and will allow you to open them up and edit them as you wish.

To learn more about editing pages, I have a guide on how to do that here.

Flamingo

The Flamingo page is another important section of your WordPress dashboard. It contains all of your inbound form submission messages. There are two key sections on this page, the Inbox, and the Spam. They’re both quite self-explanatory. Sometimes, you may get wrongly categorised spam messages, so it can be useful to look through them from time to time. If you find this is happening regularly, let me know so that I can adjust the filtering settings.

To view more information about someone’s message, click on the highlighted text in the first column. This will open a screen containing two tables “Fields” and “Meta.” For the most part, you will only need to worry about the “Fields” section. In it, you can see all the information that was posted through the form, such as name, email and message.

Statistics

This is another important page for your site. It contains all of the statistics regarding your website which can be really useful to you for understanding the success of any marketing campaigns you might have related to your site. For the most part, you will only need to worry about the first few sections, however there is a lot of information it provides you with if you want to take a further look at it.

These statistics are the same statistics which are displayed on your homepage/dashboard. You can learn more about this statistics page here.

Footer Config

This is the page where you can customise the text which appears in your website’s footer. It looks like this:

In this case, we have some about text, a location, an email, a phone number and then a copyright year. To edit this, all you need to do is click on the textboxes, and change the text. Don’t forget to click on the “Save Changes” button on the right hand side when you’re done.

Next Steps: Further Customisation

Now that you’ve logged in and explored the basics, it’s time to delve deeper into customising your site. Here are some additional resources to guide you:

1. Updating Page Content Guide

Discover how to update and manage content on your pages and blog posts (if you have a blog).

2. Updating Footer Content Guide

Learn how to update the content found in your site’s footer.

3. Understanding your website’s statistics

Understand what all the bits of your website’s statistic page really mean.

Conclusion

Congratulations! You’ve successfully navigated the initial steps of customising your WordPress website. Stay tuned for more in-depth guides to help you make he most out of you’re online space.