 So nearly I kind of have a confession to make. Okay. I have this new blog up, you know, but all I'm really doing is posting. I mean, I see all these things up on my WordPress dashboard. I have no idea what they mean. I just kind of ignore them. Yeah, and you're not alone. Well, let me give you and the audience at home a little crash course on the WordPress dashboard here on The Journey. So I'll be honest, the first time I was in WordPress 2, the dashboard was just overwhelming. There are so many options on the left-hand side of the top and then you go through there and there's even more of a rabbit hole to go through. Exactly. And like most people, especially you at home, just getting started, we go with what we know, we go to how to add a page and how to make posts. Right. Don't really touch much else. We might have a developer do all of it, but it's really important to understand some of the aspects so you can really manage it yourself. And the event that something happens, you don't have to rely on someone else to go and make some quick fixes. So are you up for my little crash course on the WordPress dashboard? Yes, please. Cool. Let's go check it out. So I'm going to take you through some of the most important elements. With WordPress, there skies the limit of all the options that you have, but we'll kind of take it step by step and go over the most important parts. So let's go through posts since that's what you're most comfortable with. The post is where you can go and add different blog type posts to your website. Super popular with blogs. May show you the page editor. So right here, we have basically default little page editor. Add a title does exactly that. You can add your title, title of the blog post. Then right here is what was pretty new with WordPress 5.0 and up. It's called the Gutenberg editor. So what this did is made the whole editing experience a lot easier, especially for first-time users. So it was named Gutenberg after the Gutenberg press in kind of like the printing block, whatnot, kind of same principle. You'll have different little printing blocks of content on your website. So you can either hit the plus right here and search through it all. You can start typing or a little shortcut you can do slash and then it'll kind of give you the little quick list. So if you want to start with image, you can do that here or you can just start typing. Now on the right-hand side under the document tab, this is some of the just different elements of post. Most people don't even look at this, which is why I want to show you just in case because I know you're here a lot, but it's good to know. So you can set basically when you want this post to publish. You can set a featured image that'll show up basically right on top of the blog post itself, whether it's like on your blog post overview page or on blog single post itself. You can set up an excerpt if you want a specific episode there. There's discussion if you want to allow comments or not and then post attributes. Some templates have different basically styles of how you want the page. Maybe you want this blog post to have a right sidebar. Some themes have that. Maybe you want a left or not at all. And this theme has kind of its own separate section for sidebar. So that's post in a nutshell. Really it's all about just writing content, whether it's video content or blog content, like a blog post with words. And then when you're done, you can publish it, you can preview it and do all the good stuff. Good to know. All right, so that was really post, but let me just kind of take a step back and show you really the overview of WordPress and really the structure. So the left-hand menu is going to be basically all your different settings and functions that you do on the WordPress site, like your post, media pages, comments, all that good stuff. The top usually has a quick link to your website. You can see some comments, quick links to add a new post. And then usually plugins will start to add their own little widgets up here just for quick access. And then there's screen options in the top right where some pages you can add and remove different content if you don't want to see it there just by checking the box. And then if you're stuck, there's help. Basically these goes to the WordPress codecs. There's lots of different help articles and blog posts around WordPress to help those newbies out. Okay. And I see pages. I mean, what is that for? You really have stuck to post, have you? I really have. Yes, you have. You have a privacy policy and a sample page. So let me tell you about pages. It's got the same format as a blog post itself. As you see here, we have the title and the content, but this is really like creating a home page or an about page or a contact page. These are actual pages on the site that aren't blog posts. Okay. I've been wanting to create an about me page. Yes. So you would do about me. You would add your stuff. Maybe you have an image here. I'm going to pretend this is a picture of you. I'm a burger. I'm a burger. And then you add your bio and all that good stuff and any other elements that you want on this website here. Then when you're done, you would publish, publish, then you'd view the page. Obviously it's just going to be a big picture of a burger and some random text. That's about it. So that's a page. I would highly recommend you have something, especially an about me page, a contact us page. You're a blog, so you don't need to have any services unless you go that route in the long run. All right. So next up on our list is appearance menu. So the appearance menu has a lot of different stuff around really the style of your website. What I would like to do, especially on a brand new website build is find a new theme. I'm one of those people that tries not to stick with the same theme on every website, which is not the normal. I would usually recommend just find a thing that you love and stick with it. Make it easy on yourself. I don't like it making easy on myself. But when you go to themes, you can see some of the feature themes. You can go to popular and kind of just scroll through and there's literally hundreds and hundreds of themes like the power of WordPress is it's an open source platform, which means anyone and everyone can contribute to it. So if I actually knew how to code, I can make my own theme and add it to the WordPress repository and literally anyone can use it. It's all open source. It's free to use. So you really just go through and if you like a theme, you can install it absolutely free here. And then moving on to customize. This is basically how most themes let you customize the look and feel of your site. So it'll actually give you a preview of your website, how it looks. We got Alex eats foods, all my adventures and all your reviews so far. And then on left hand side, you can kind of just go through each of the options and kind of see what they are. So you have like general settings, what typography you want to use. And with this, your customize may not look the same as this. It really depends on the theme you use. Now some most actually most themes will use the customize. But some themes may have a separate theme options. It'll usually be somewhere around here for theme options. Really just depends on the theme that you've chosen. It's kind of the good and bad thing with WordPress, like anyone can make a theme, but anyone can make the theme their way. So you have to end up learning their way of the theme. Next up, we have widgets, widgets are basically the things on your sidebar. Right now I see you have search and recent posts, which is pretty common for a blog like you. But you have a subscribe option, you have a WooCommerce sidebar, if you ever want to sell stuff, you have a very top bar. And your theme gives you a lot of different widget options and sidebars to use, which is super helpful. You can add so much to it or just random text, whatever you want really. All right, so next up we have menus. Okay, I've used that before. That's where I set up the link to my home page and my menu bar. Perfect. Yep. I do see you have the home link here. You can add any more pages like you're about me that we just created with a picture of your burger. It's basically you. It's a new profile photo adds right there. You can go ahead and save menu. You can create multiple menus depending on your theme. Like this one gives the option to have your primary menu off the top of your page, also one for your footer menu and then a very top bar menu. But basically it's just your links to the top of the menu bar. And then I told you a little bit about plugins recently, right? Yeah, plugins solve everything, right? Literally everything. So I do see here you have lots of plugins installed, about nine, seven are active, but those plugins let you basically add extra functionality onto WordPress. WordPress by itself, pretty solid, but these plugins make it even better. Again, open source. So there's tons of plugins to choose from. Say you wanted to, I don't know, add a slider on your website. You can go to plugins, add new. And what's a slider? So you see those websites that have the content there and it'll just slide through and have different piece of content. Right. So that's basically what that is. So if I search slider, I can't type today. If I search slider, basically it'll give me different plugins that'll help me create those sliders. Like there's a video slider here, slide anything, then you can easily install it. Literally just search whatever you're looking for and it's a search engine, if you will. It'll search WordPress and give you all the responses based on that search result. And then you choose install now and then activate and then it's there. And again, with plugins, every plugin's different. So you kind of have to learn their settings, but it's not too difficult. Cool. All right, Alex. So are you going to have any other users on your website or is it just going to be you? So I'll be the only contributor, but I do want to get some subscribers on this website. Perfect. So the user section basically lets you manage all the users on your website. I see here your name is RT1XRX. That's me. Probably should change that. But you can also set up different users. So if you ever did want to have maybe a web developer manage it or things like that, or if you want to have your people to subscribe, they can set up their own profiles on your website and be subscribers. Okay. All that is managed right here. And then let me take you through some of the different user levels because there are a few to choose from. Now say you wanted to have different users on your website, but maybe you don't want them to have all the power. Right. That's the power of WordPress. There's different user roles that they can use and set up. Like by default, there's a subscriber. They can basically just edit their profile and add comments to your website. And then there's contributors who can contribute to your website, make their own blog posts. There's authors, kind of the same principle. Each of these levels have different permission sets. Now administrator basically has the same amount of access that you have as a site owner. So only give someone access as an administrator if you absolutely trust them or if they absolutely have to, right? So don't give my subscribers administrator access. I highly wouldn't recommend that. Good to know. Because they can literally just destroy your whole site with a click of a button. Yeah. Real bad. And then next up, let's move on to tools. Now with tools, there's not a whole lot that you'll have to really do here. The biggest use that people use with tools are the import and export. So say you're coming from WordPress.com onto your own self-hosted WordPress site. You can use the export feature on WordPress.com to export all of your content to a file and then come down here to tools and import and then import your WordPress file and add all your content making it so that that transition is nice and smooth. All right. So let's talk about settings. Now there's a lot of different options under settings. We'll kind of break them down one by one. So in general settings, this is going to let you set your site title and your tagline. I see here, it's perfect. You have Alex eats food and all my adventures for the tagline, the WordPress address URL and site address URL. Basically, if you want to change your domain name at any point or update it, maybe you don't want the WWW. You would do so here. For most people, I wouldn't recommend changing this because it can break your website. I've done it myself quite a few times. Highly wouldn't recommend it, but you can go down here. There's different things. If you want to update your email address, I see it's something super random. Probably want to update that membership. Anyone can register. So if you do want subscribers on your site, make sure you check this box. If you don't, if maybe if you're just a small business site, you probably don't want anyone to register on your site. Leave that unchecked. And then you have some date and time formats here on general. All right. So we're going to skip over writing and just go into the reading settings. This one's super important. If you don't want your page to just be a blog, maybe you created a brand new homepage that's super tailored to your, your foodie experience or your business, you set that here. So you would choose a static homepage. You choose about me. We're going to pretend that's your homepage. And then your post page will make that sample. So now your blogs actually on the sample page and your homepage is actually the about me that's going to show up blog posts to show at most. So on your blog page now, your new one, it's only going to show 10 posts and there's going to be a read more that they can choose there. As always, save changes. If you don't know that stuff stays, you have to go back later on. Moving on to discussion real quick here. Just discussion goes over just different comment settings. You can go through then check the list of what you want and what you don't want. And then last but not least on the settings one that I really wanted to talk about are permalinks. What are permalinks? Permalinks are basically just a fancy way of saying the, the stuff that comes after your domain and the URL. So by default WordPress makes it plain. So it'd be like, maybe your blog post is alexeatsfood.com slash question mark P equals one, two, three. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's definitely not pretty. It's kind of ugly. So you have different options depending on your style. Maybe if you do post all the time, you maybe want that day and name or month and name in that, that URL there. For the most part, most small businesses will just use the post name. It's the one I recommend usually, but if you want to make it really custom, you can actually add your own down here. So maybe I want the category to show up first and then the post name, I would click those buttons and then save. So now if I go to when your blog post, it's alexeatsfood.com slash recipes slash and then the blog title. Okay. Makes it a little bit prettier and better for SEO. All right. So that's the overview of the WordPress dashboard, but there's really another portion of WordPress that I really want to talk to all of you about. And those are WordPress updates like core plugins and themes. Now Alex, how often do you update those? Well, I did update them yesterday because I knew we were making this video, but before that it was probably about a year. Okay. That's not good. Yeah. So these plugins, themes and just WordPress in general has updates that they do for performance issues, for security issues, and just new features too. So it's super important to constantly update these. I would probably check on your site at least once every maybe one or two weeks to see if there's there because if there is like a massive vulnerability with a plugin and they sent out an update and you did not update that, the bad people out there go and check sites, see that you have that older version of the plugin and they know, cool, that plugin is exploitable. Now get into your site and I've hacked it and then it's a whole other deal that you don't want to deal with. Okay. I'll definitely do a better job. Yeah. So make sure you're just checking this every so often. There are lots of tools out there that do auto updates for you. So maybe your hosting provider might definitely something to check out. All right. Cool. So now I can start taking full advantage of every part of my WordPress dashboard. Let us know in the comments down below what kind of videos you want to see in the future. Yeah. I wanted to make sure you smash that like button as always. If you got some value out of this and you're now a WordPress expert, subscribe to our channel. So you get these videos first. This is the journey. We'll see you next time.