Dashboard

The Dashboard is the screen you land on when you sign in. Think of it as home base. Click your site name in the top left from anywhere, and you come back here.

It is a summary, not a place you edit things. Nothing on it changes your website.

The whole Dashboard. Four parts, top to bottom.

1. The create buttons. Each one opens a blank form for a new entry: a new page, a new service, a new photo album. They are shortcuts, nothing more. The same forms are one click away in the menu on the left, under Content. The last one, Upload Media, is the odd one out: it opens your Media library rather than a form.

2. The three counters. Drafts counts entries you have started but not published, so the public cannot see them yet. Media files counts the photos and files you have uploaded. Users counts the people who can sign in.

3. The Content panel. One row per kind of content, with a mark and a number. The number is how many you have. A green check mark means those entries are published, so the public can see them. Orange means drafts, which visitors cannot see. Click a row to open that list. It is a faster way in than the menu when you already know what you want.

4. Recent Activity. The last ten entries anyone changed, newest first. The gray label after each name is the kind of content it is. The mark on the left works the same way as in the Content panel: green for published, and a different mark for a draft. Click a name to open that entry and edit it.

Saving and publishing explains what published and draft mean for your visitors.

That is the whole screen. Every real job starts in the menu on the left, and the tour of the admin panel walks you through it.