Posting Your First Entry on Your Wordpress Blog

Ok, so you’ve got your blog installed on your very own URL, how exciting! Now you need to figure out how to start posting entries to it or it won’t be much of a blog at all. The first thing you need to do is to go to your Wordpress Blog admin section. From here you can control all aspects of your blog. How it looks, what to display on the sidebar, and yes, creating new posts and/or pages.

You can find your Wordpress admin section by typing “/wp-admin” after your blog’s URL in your browser’s address bar. So for example “http://yourblog.com/wp-admin”. The first time you do this you will be asked for your username and password. You should have received this information via email when you first set up your blog. You might want to check your inbox now if you’ve never logged into the admin section.

Just as a side note, it’s very important that you change your default password to something that’s easier to remember. You can do this in the “Settings” section of the Wordpress admin section.

Once you’ve logged in you will land in your admin section’s dashboard. This is a sort of overview of what’s going on in your blog. On the left you will find a side navigation that will let you access the different parts of the admin section. If you click on “Posts” (the first option from the top) you will get a small dropdown, select the “Add New” option. You will be directed to a page where you will find a large text field at the top (this is for the title of your post) and a larger textarea under it for the actual written content of the post. This textarea has basic text editing tools above it and can also support html markup if you click on the “HTML” tab on the top right of it.

You can save your progress at any time by clicking the “Save Draft” button on the top right of your dashboard. This will not publish the post so it will not be visible to your audience. You can publish the post by pressing the blue “Publish” button underneath “Save Draft”. Remember you can always come back and edit the post even after it’s published by accessing the “Posts” section of the dashboard. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like: