Now let’s deal with a few of the basics and begin with logging into and out of WordPress. Log Into WordPress Whenever you want to work on your website you need to login into WordPress by typing the following into your browser:
http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin (where ‘yourdomain.com’ is your actual domain name. In my case this is keepingchickens.net). In my case http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/
You’ll see the familiar WordPress login screen:
Enter the username and password that you were given when you installed WordPress and
click ‘Login’.
It’s a good idea to bookmark this login because you’ll be using it a lot.
If you have a computer-generated password you can change this to something else after
we get started.
The top of the screen is all about ‘Jetpack’ which is one of WordPress’ latest gizmos that
we are not going to use in this tutorial and which we’ll deactivate later. So ignore that for
the time being.
The welcome messages shown on this screen vary from time so don’t worry if the body of
your screen looks a little bit different from this.
If you see the ‘Welcome to WordPress’ box, you can click ‘Dismiss’ in the top right corner of
the box because we’re not going to use that, either.
What we are really interested in at this stage is the vertical menu down the left-hand side
of the screen headed ‘Dashboard’, which is where all the behind-the-scenes action takes
place.
We’re going to be using this set of dashboard drop-down menus to access the inner
workings of WordPress to build a website. Whenever I say ‘from the dashboard…’ I will
be directing you to click on one of these left-side menu items. I will explain each one that
you need to use as we go along.
View Your Website
As The World Sees It
Anytime you want to see what your site currently looks like, from the dashboard, hover
your mouse over the site title up in the top left corner of the screen and click ‘Visit Site’.
The whole site will be displayed and you can view it as a visitor will see it. You will have
to click the back button to get back to the dashboard.
Log Out Of WordPress
To log out of WordPress, look at the top right corner of the screen where it says ‘Howdy
…’, hover your mouse over this, and click ‘Log Out’ on the drop-down menu. WordPress
logs you out of your website but leaves the log-on box on the screen in case you want to
go back in.
