 Hello. Now that you've logged into your dashboard through the login screen at the URL for your website slash wp-admin, you'll be presented with the dashboard. The dashboard here is the basic central location of WordPress where everything happens. If you want to work with your website, this is where you're going to be. Now, in this video, I just want to show you a couple of things about how you can customize the layout of the dashboard and what's here. For each of the things that I'll kind of be pointing out, there will be separate videos that will do a deeper dive into what each of these menu items do. So the general area here of your dashboard, labeled dashboard, this at a glance area tells you how many posts, comments, and pages are on your website and we'll have videos for each of those. And what theme you're also running. The theme is the look and feel of your website. Activity will list things like recently published content. So especially if you are a multi-user environment and you want to get an idea of who's done what lately, this is a good place to do it here. And what comments have come in recently to your website. Now, I'll just mention here that comments are, there are different ways you can do comments, pending, approved, spam, and trashed comments. And in the comments video, we'll talk about each of those different things. Over on the right hand side here, you have the quick draft. This is an area where you can, I just want to write a quick post, nothing fancy, title, and some text, and that's it, and quickly publish it. I don't generally recommend you use this, but it is available to you. And then you have here news about WordPress, which is something that you can pay attention to if you're more technically oriented and want to find out what's going on with the project as a whole. But most of the, if it's important news that I think you need to know, I will put it on the project website. Now in each of these sections, you'll notice there's a little up triangle. So if I was to click any one of those, it'll just kind of hide it. You can also, if you really want to rearrange these things by drag and drop. So if you use something like quick draft a lot, you can do it, you can move it over to the left, or at a glance is kind of up or right, because that's something you want to pay attention to. One other thing I will mention that you will see eventually under at a glance is the amount of space that you are using for your media. Now media is going to be things like pictures, video, PDFs, documents, that sort of thing. Right under here under what theme you're using as you start filling that space, you will be told what percentage of that space you are currently using. There is a built-in limit of 40 megabytes, which can fill up quickly. I can always give you more space. So if you start hitting about 80 or 90%, let me know and I will happily give you more space in the system. One other area here you can see is the screen options. And if I click on that, you can actually turn on and off these different areas. But I'll admit most people don't play with that all too much. Now across the top, you're going to see in this case the name of the site you're currently working on. So if, for example, you're at Atkinson Public Library, this will say Atkinson Public Library. This site that I'm using here, we've called For Video, because we're using it just for creation of these videos. This area here with these zero, this will tell you how many comments you have waiting for you to take a look at. One of the things we'll talk about in the comments video is how to turn on moderation, so that if somebody sends you a comment, you have to approve it before it gets posted to the live website. That'll tell me how many you have there. You also have this new, and this is kind of a quick shortcut to getting to things like new posts, new media, new links, new page and new users. Again, we'll talk about all of those. And these are just really shortcuts to things that you'll find over here on this menu on the left, which we'll get to in just a moment. The last thing you'll see up here in the upper right is kind of a hello to you. This tells you what user name is logged in at the moment. In my case, Michael Sowers. If your username was Jay Smith, it will say, you know, Howdy Jay Smith. And you can edit your profile here. Again, another video will talk about that. And you can log out of this system here. Last section I want to talk about is the menu over here on the left. This is where you're going to access pretty much everything. So for example, if you want to do posts, notice here, if I hover over posts, I get a sub menu where I can see all of them. I can add a new one categories tags. Again, I know it sounds a little redundant, a lot of videos about each of these things. If I hover over media, I'll get a sub menu, links, pages, comments, comments doesn't have a sub menu as you'll see appearance, plugins, users, tools, settings, calendar. Now one other thing you can do is you have this collapse menu here, show you that if you collapse the menu, it'll just kind of minimize here, give you more space to work on the screen. We can click this little button and bring it back. The one other thing I'll show you real quick here before I wrap up this video is any of these ones with a sub menu, let's say appearance. If I actually click on appearance, what's going to happen is it's going to take me to the appearance menu, but then you'll notice what was the fly out is kind of now expanded here in the sidebar. So if you were to send me an email saying, Hey, where do I find the widgets for my website? I'll generally send you an email back. This is go to the dashboard. Okay, and then click on appearance widgets. So in this case, if I go all the way back to my front dashboard, I would see here, okay, Michael said click on appearance. Now I can either hover over appearance and click on widgets, or I can click on appearance, and then click on widgets underneath that. Okay, you can always get back to the dashboard home by clicking on dashboard. You'll notice under there there is an area called updates. That's something we take care of at this end. That's nothing you never need to worry about. That's one of the benefits of participating in this program. So that's an overview of the dashboard. And like I said, in all of the future videos in this series, we'll be taking a look at all of those things I mentioned and all the little picky little details that are available to you from the dashboard. But this just gives you kind of an idea of what's here and what you can get to. Alright, thanks for watching.