Preliminary Site Set Up
If you’re in the dashboard view, you’ll also see a black column on the left side of the page with a vertical list of menu items. We’ll call this the Left Menu Bar.
If you don’t see the Left Menu Bar, you’re probably in the page view mode. If you’re logged in, you should still see the Top Menu Bar. To get back to the dashboard view, hover over the name of your site (the second menu item in the Top Menu Bar) and click Dashboard.
The third menu item in the Top Menu Bar is Customize. Clicking this takes you to the WordPress customizer. On the left side of this page you’ll see a white menu bar. We’ll call it the Customizer. This is where you can set certain theme options.
If you want to see what the site looks like while you’re working on it, hover over the site name in the Top Menu Bar and click Visit Site.
When you become more familiar with WordPress, you’ll find that there’s usually more than one way to do something. For now we’ll just show one of the ways.
On the edit profile page, scroll down to the fields for First Name and Last Name, and enter your name.
In the field for Display name publicly as change this from your username to your regular name.
To save these changes, click UPDATE PROFILE at the bottom of the page.
In the left menu bar, click Pages > Add New. You’ll be taken to a form to create the new page. In the Add title field, enter “Home” or something else you’d like to call the home page. You can go back to add content to the page later. For now click the PUBLISH button on the right side of the page.
In the Left Menu click Appearance > Customize. This takes you to the site Customizer.
On the left side of the customizer, scroll down until you see Homepage Settings. Click this, then where it says Your homepage displays, click A static page, then in the dropdown under Homepage select the page you’d like to set as the home page.
To save these changes, click PUBLISH at the top of the page, and click the X to exit the Customizer.
Create a new page by clicking Pages > Add New in the Left Menu Bar.
In the Add title field, enter “Blog” or whatever you want to call this page, then click the PUBLISH button.
Next, go to the Customizer by clicking Appearance > Customize.
In the Customizer, click Homepage Settings and under Posts page select the page to set as the blog page.
Click PUBLISH to save these settings and click X to exit the Customizer.
Go to the menu editing page by click Appearance > Menus in the Left Menu Bar.
On this page, there’s be an input field called Menu Name. In this field enter “Header Main Menu” and click CREATE MENU.
Under Menu Settings for Display location check “Header Main”. We don’t recommend checking Auto add pages because you may not want every page to automatically be added to the menu. Click SAVE MENU.
Under Add menu items, under Pages, click View All to see all your pages. Check the ones to add to the menu and click ADD TO MENU. The pages will appear under Menu structure. To reorder the menu items, you can drag and drop them to another position. To have one menu item appear as a dropdown under another menu item, you can drag it below the parent menu item and indent it so that it’s offset to the right under the parent menu item.
To remove a menu item, click the down arrow on the right side of the menu item and click Remove.
Click SAVE MENU when you are done setting up the menu.