WordPress Dashboard Wizardry

Navigating the WordPress dashboard maze.

I was asked by a good friend, Social Media Queen Nicky Kriel, to deliver a workshop on using the WordPress dashboard at her Social Media Summit event . She’s the author of a the successful book How To Twitter For Business Success and talks about social media on her blog here.

The WordPress dashboard is a bit of a challenge for non-technical people and many clients say that it’s the one thing that confuses and scares them at first. As with any new territory once you’ve been shown around and focus on the relevant and most important parts you usually start to wonder what all the fuss was about.

So my workshop will be for people who are complete beginners to WordPress, those who have begun using it but feel like they are stumbling around in the dark and those who want to check to see if they have made the right moves to get their blog noticed. This was a practical session showing the audience where to find things and how to operate the WordPress dashboard.

Here’s a list of what covered:

 1.     Ten main factors to get right when first starting.

 2.     How to choose the best theme for your blog.

 3.     Plugins – the 10 most important plugins on your site for:

• • Spam prevention.
  • Contact.
  • Social sharing e.g. Twitter, Facebook and Google +.
• • Broken links.
  • Back-up.
  • Analysing your results.
  • Optimisation of:
    • SEO.
    • images.
    • database.
    • speed.

 4.     Simple WordPress dashboard operations.

• • Embed a video.
  • Find and add a picture.
  • Add a widget.
  • Categories and tags.

 5.     Ten Top Tips.

It was a challenge as there was a lot to cover.  Since I use the WordPress dashboard every day I was able to give the people attending a more complete understanding of how the dashboard works. It’s just a case of re-orientation so you can work out what goes where and what happens when you click various buttons.

Want to master the WordPress dashboard?

I help many of my clients get to grip with WordPress in my coaching for WordPress sessions. I’ve helped all sorts of people develop a successful blog for their business. So if you fancy a no obligation chat with me about how you can start a blog I’d love to hear from you. Just contact me here.

What’s your biggest challenge with WordPress or the WordPress dashboard? Leave me a question in the comments below and I’ll see if I can help you solve it.