Once you have established your site, you will want to do several things to individualize it.
Selecting a theme
A theme is the overall appearance that you site will have. On the left menu, go to Appearance >> Themes and see what is available to you. You can preview all of the themes. Even after you select to activate, you can always select another one. To see what the them really looks like, click on the link to your site at the top of the dashboard page. To get back to the dashboard, just hit the BACK button. (See page 8.)
Changing the top logo
When you have activated a theme, its name will appear at the end of the navigation list on the left of the dashboard. Click on that, and that will take you to the General settings for the theme. If you want to upload a logo, you can do that here. If you do, be sure to deselect the Text Title option. When you click on the Save All Changes button at the upper right, you can then click on the site link in the upper left and see what it looks like. Some people, at the beginning, to leave the Text Title option clicked until they can design a proper logo.
Establishing pages and categories
This is something you will want to do early on. See pages 9-10 for explanation about how to do this.
Widgets
To set up the widgets for your site, go to Appearance >> Widgets and see what widgets are available to you. Here you will probably need to experiment a bit to see what widgets you want and what will look good on your pages. You can find a good explanation of widgets here: http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Widgets
Posting
Posting is the central operation for your site, and much of this guide is devoted to explaining the various aspects of posting. Try to get as familiar with these operations as possible as quickly as possible.
Inviting the staff
Now, you’re ready to invite your students to join the staff of the website. See page 25.
