by Mike Miller, Web Designer

Do you like to visit blogs on the web? Are you not sure? Chances are, you have several bookmarks saved that are powered by blogging software. There’s also a good chance several of those sites are powered by WordPress- a popular, full-featured blogging tool that we often utilize for our client’s blogs. A big reason for its popularity is that it’s very easy to use and manages posts, users, and more.

But, like any software, there is a learning curve required to understand how to maximize its benefits. This article will introduce you to WordPress’ back-end administration and get you blogging in no time!

This article covers the following topics:

• Admin Overview
• Adding/Editing users
• Writing/Managing Posts

Admin Overview

WordPress’ back-end administration app is where you’ll write, manage, and edit all your posts, comments, users and more. To get started, you’ll want to access the WordPress admin section, and log in.

Once you’ve logged in, you’ll be presented with the Dashboard, a quick way to see new activity on your blog such as posts, comments, and stats, as well as activity in the WordPress community. There are also helpful links to WordPress documentation and support.

Across the top of the admin app you’ll see the title of your blog with a link to view the site and the WordPress admin navigation with several tabs running across the screen. It’s a lot of tabs, but as an admin you get to see everything and the kitchen sink! (If you plan to have additional people contributing to your blog, you can assign them different user roles, which helps simply the navigation they see quite a bit.)

In your daily routine you’ll only be using a handful of these tabs, but lets review them all to give an idea of what they do:

• Dashboard - Your site at a bird’s eye glance
• Write - Add new posts to your blog
• Manage - Review/Edit posts, categories, uploaded files, and more
• Comments - Review/Edit all comments that have been added to your blog
• Blogroll - Add links to other blogs that you’d like your visitors to know about
• Presentation - Change the look and feel of your blog
• Plugins - Install free plug-ins to further customize your blog
• Users - Add/Edit users on your blog including administrators, editors, writers, and more
• Options - An advanced area to manage the way WordPress handles your blog

Lets start in the Users tab. (If you don’t plan on having multiple users, you can skip to the Write section.)

User Management

The Users tab lets Administrators add and edit users on your blog. There are several different user roles available, which gives you the ability to scale your blog from a small, personal blog, to a large, web magazine with multiple authors, editors, and contributors.

Let’s review the five different types available so you know how to assign the right role to the right person:

• Administrators - Administrators have access to every option in WordPress
• Editors/Authors - Editors and Authors handle the publishing/editing of posts, and comments on your blog. They can see the Write, Manage, and Comments tabs; all other tabs are only available at the Administrator level. Editors have the additional ability to manage static pages and categories.
• Contributors - Contributors are able write and save posts, but they can only submit them for review, they can’t publish to the site. Contributors can see the Manage and Comments tabs, but are only able to view items, not edit.
• Subscribers - Subscribers can only see their profile. The subscriber role is if you require visitors to register to post comments or for visitors who comment often and want to save their info on your blog.

We recommend the Author role for most situations. Authors have no restriction to write, edit, and manage the content on your blog, but aren’t burdened with the more complicated aspects available in WordPress.

Writing Posts

When you first click on the Write tab, you’ll see the Write Post page. There is also a Write Page tab in the sub-navigation, which is only available to Administrators and Editors. WordPress defines pages as static content that won’t change often, such as About pages. For this article, we’re going to concentrate on the Post page.

The first thing you should see is text boxes for your Post’s title, content, and tags in the main content area. This is where people will be spending most of their time, but other options very important to the posting process run along the side. Let’s review the post sidebar:

• Categories - select one or more categories to make it easier for visitors to parse and search content. Categories are created outside of the post in the Manage tab.
• Discussion - set whether you want comments and/or pings for the post. Comments allow visitors to respond to the post; Pings are a list of other sites that are linking to your post.
• Post Password - lets you password-protect the post.
• Post Slug - lets you customize the way the post appears in the URL, making it easier for bookmarking. For example, typing my first post into the slug field will appear as http://www.mysite.com/blog/my-first-post/.
• Post Status - lets you set the post as published, pending, draft or private. This is an important option for authors. If they’re writing a long post, they’ll want to set it as draft to prevent inadvertently publishing a work-in-progress! This also applies if a published post needs major editing. Setting it to draft will prevent visitors from seeing the post.
• Post Timestamp - lets you define the date you want the post to appear as published. The timestamp defaults to the current date of when the post was first written.
• Post Author - allows authors, editors, and administrators to select the author of the post.

Moving back to the main content area, lets create a post! Type what you’d like your title to be. In this case, we’ll type: My First Post. Next, move to the post area, where you add all the content for your post.

There are two tabs: Visual and Code. The Visual tab is a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get) that has common text formatting options similar to word processing applications, as well as other options like adding links, and spell checking.

The Code tab is where you copy and paste html code for images, YouTube videos, widgets, and more. If you’re copying embed code from an external site, you’ll want to make sure you paste it in the Code tab or else WordPress will render all the code as plain text!

On the Visual tab, add a few lines of text, formatting however you wish. Then, click the Save & Continue Editing button below the tags field.

Once your post saves, a preview link will appear at the top-right of the post field. You can click this link to see how your post will look to visitors.

Now let’s move to the Tags field below the post area. Tags are keywords relevant to the subject of your post. If your post was about WordPress you would add the following tags: blog, blogging, posts, comments, etc.

When you publish, WordPress will automatically convert the words before the commas into links that users can click on to see other posts on your site with the same tag. If they clicked blogging, they would see all posts that are related to blogging.

That’s all you need to create a simple post! At this point, you could click Publish, and add your new post to your blog. But what if you want to upload an image to add to the post?

Below the Tags field is the Upload section. This gives writers a simple way to upload images to the web server and then insert them into their posts. Uploading is simple: select the file from your desktop, add a title and description, and then click the upload button.

Once the file has uploaded to the server, WordPress will switch to the browse tab.

This tab contains code to add the image to the post. There are 3 options to choose from:

• URL - the direct path to the image
• Thumbnail linked to file - copy and paste this code into the Code tab to create a thumbnail of the image that links to a larger version.
• Thumbnail linked to page - copy and paste this code into the Code tab to create a thumbnail of the image that links to a new blog page with a larger version of the image.

You can also use the Browse All tab to see all images uploaded to your web server. When you click a thumbnail, it will show the 3 code options for linking to the image. Below the Upload/Browse section are several more panes for advanced options. We’ll cover these in another article, for now, click Publish and add your first post!

Managing Posts

Now that you have a live post, you may want to edit the text, tags, categories or other options. You access published posts through the Manage tab.

In addition, there are several other types of content you can manage:

• Posts - View, edit, delete published posts. Available to Admins, Editors, Authors, and Contributors. Contributors will only be able to view published posts.
• Pages - View, edit, delete published pages. Available to Admins and Editors.
• Uploads - Edit, delete uploaded files. Available to Admins, Editors, and Authors.
• Categories - Add, edit, delete categories. Available to Admins and Editors.
• Files, Import, Export - Advanced options only available to Admins.

To edit a post, click the edit link of the post and it will take you to the Write Post page. From here, you can make any changes needed and click Save to save your edits. Note that this will update the blog immediately if the Post Status is set to published.

Summary

You should now be able to manage users, add posts with categories, tags, and uploaded images, and manage posts that have been published. This is just scratching the surface of WordPress and its features, but should give you all you need to know for a successful blog!

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