This entry is from my series: Starting A Blog Using WordPress and Dreamhost.
Now that you have the blog set up and its name should be propagated around the internet, its time make the blog yours.
Things to change:
- Initial WordPress welcome blog entry.
- The comment to the initial blog entry.
- Blog sub-title.
When you come to your new blog you will find it uses the standard kind of boring blue and white theme. We’ll talk about how to change that in the future.
Over on the right hand side of your blog is a column. In that column there are some links under the title Meta. If you haven’t logged in yet it looks like the image to the right. Click on Login and enter your username and password. If you have logged it it will have a Site Admin link, click that.
Now you will come to the WordPress Dashboard. Along the top of this page is the title of your blog and link to go back to it.
Right under that there are a list of words, the first being Dashboard, which is grey. Each of those words is the title of a page of commands. If you click one, it will become the grey one and you’ll get different content under it.
The Dashboard is kind of a summary page, with summary info to the right and WordPress current events in the middle. If you don’t see anything in the middle, that’s OK. It takes WP a while sometimes to get its info and it doesn’t want to make you wait.
We want to change our initial blog entry, so click the word Manage. When you do another list of words will appear under the commands and the word Posts will be selected. Under that you’ll see a list of posts already in your blog. There’s only one right now. Under than you’ll see a list of comments, and right now there is only one of those too.
At this point we could just delete the blog entry that is there and go create a new one. But instead we are going to edit the one already there. To the right of the post in the post list is a link called Edit. Click it.
You end up in the standard editing screen, but with the contents pre filled with the existing blog entry. The only two fields you need to worry about at this point is the Title and the Post fields. Edit them to be what ever you want to have as your first entry. Then click the Save button.
When you do this it will take you back to the list of posts. Hopefully the only post listed has the new title you gave it.
While we’re here lets take care of that sample comment. To the right of the comment date is a link that says “Delete”. Click it to delete the comment. You get an alert asking if you really want to do it. Click Yes.
Now that comment is gone.
Last thing on our list is to fix the sub-title of the blog. It is under Options at the top of the page, so click that link.
The thing we are looking for is in the General sub tag is is called Tagline. Change your blogs tagline to the right. For now don’t change anything else, unless you think you know what you are doing. Changing the Title is probably OK. Click the “Update Options” button at the bottom of the page.
Now we are done. You can click the View Site link at the top of the page to look at your improved blog.
I want to keep these post short so I’m going to stop now, but come back next time and we’ll talk about categories.
Technorati Tags: blogging, How to start a blog, WordPress