When looking over your site, you decide to change things up–but lo and behold, you’re not logged in. As soon as you log in and type in your information, you are taken to the wonderful world of your dashboard.
What is your dashboard?
Well, if you’re like me, you may at first completely ignore the dashboard and venture straight into one of your other menu items, like Posts or Pages. Don’t do this. Dashboard is actually a nifty tool to make your site a little easier to work with and quicker to attend to. Important update information will also appear at the top of your dashboard or any other kind of theme/plugin notification.
If your site is still fairly new yet, your dashboard will look something like this:
After tinkering around, it can look like this:
To personalize your dashboard is easy. Up in the top of your dashboard, there is a tab that says “screen options.” When you click on this, a couple of different options fall down: At a Glance, Activity, Quick Draft, WordPress Events and News, and Welcome.
“At a Glance” shows how many posts and pages you currently have. For mine, I have 5 posts and 1 page.
“Activity” ventures further in depth as to what your posts are called and when they were published. This box also allows you to see any drafts you have scheduled to post. Once your site receives comments, the comments will pop up under this box as well. From here, you can easily remove or peruse the comments by hovering your cursor over them. Less time is spent clicking and navigating because of this.
“Quick Drafts” is a handy tool for moments when you have an idea and need to quick jot them down. Underneath the “Quick Drafts” box will be a note of any recent drafts, making it easy to jump back in where you left off. In case you have a lot of different drafts in their construction phase, the 5 most recent will pop up here.
“WordPress Events and News” keeps everyone updated on any events that are occurring for WordPress or discussions that revolve around it. If you do not really want this, you can ignore it or remove it. I turned this off.
“Welcome” is nice for just getting started with your site. It includes links to customize your site, add a blog post, play with widgets, and more. Once your site is up and running, though, it’s not necessary. You can easily turn this off as well.
To remove any of these boxes from your dashboard, uncheck the box in “Screen Options.” It will immediately disappear and free up space on your dashboard. You can also grab the boxes and change where they exist on your dashboard screen.
Forget the use of any of these tabs? Not to worry. Under the “Help” tab at the top of your dashboard exists reminders to navigate your dashboard, how to play around with layout, and what each of the dashboard boxes mean.
If you’re not happy with the color of your dashboard, you can personalize it by going to your profile and choosing a different admin scheme color. I chose ectoplasm for the fun purple and “groovy” colors.
The dashboard is more useful than it appears. So go forth and play with it!
I love that you posted about the dashboard! It is such a overlooked feature of wordpress and so many people don’t think twice about it. Great to see a thoughtful post about something that is often overlooked.