Introduction
Following on from logging as an admin, you will be taken to the backend of the website which is called the ‘dashboard’. This is the area where you can access several of the backend functions, such as creating new pages or blog articles.
This guide we will attempt to breakdown the different functions to help you navigate around the dashboard.
Dashboard main page
The below is what you will see when you sign in. While there appears to be quite a lot of content, you don’t need to worry about the majority of them.
The main things to focus on are various links that are shown at in the left menu and the links in the top-left.
In the top-left
Let’s start with the links in the top-left. There are a few buttons here which are useful.
- go to homepage – you will see a house icon with your company name. Clicking on it will take you to what is known as the ‘frontend’ of the website. These are the various webpages your clients and visitors will see. The link will always take you to the homepage. If you are doing some backend work, it might be useful to open the homepage link in another browser window.
- knowledge base – opens a link back to the Horizon online helpguides written by Practiceweb. It’s very useful if you are needing to refer to one of the guides there.
- + new – you can hover over this option to create different types of content like pages or staff profiles. This is a shorthand method of creating new content although we will cover these in dedicated guides
Left-hand menu
You will also see various links on the left menu.This forms the main menu you can use to manage particular sections of your website.
We will cover each relevant section in the dedicated guides. There are some that you can ignore entirely [they get shown as a default]. As a brief overview:
- posts – this is what the website classes blog articles as. Allows you start writing articles [if your site uses this]. Click the link to start writing a new article, or to edit existing ones.
- media – accesses your website’s media library. If you want to use images across your site, they must first be uploaded here. This contains all your uploaded images and pdfs that are used throughout the site.
- pages – allows you start creating pages, such as if you want to create a new service page. Click the link to start writing a new page, or to edit existing ones.
- comments – if the option is enabled visitors can leave comments but in the interests of reducing spam, this is disabled. You can ignore this.
- projects – you can ignore this.
- ninja forms – allows you start creating ninja forms [webforms] or to edit existing ones. You can also check the submissions for each one in this section
- appearence – allows you to customise your website’s menu structure by adding, removing or changing the way it looks.
- profile – takes you to your account profile page where you can edit some account details.
- settings – you can ignore this.
- divi – this is the visual builder tool used to create the webpages of your website. You can ignore this as divi will be used in a different way
- collapse menu – closes the left-hand menu but you can re-enable it by clicking on the arrow icon.
Once you have logged in to your site, you’ll be taken to the website dashboard. This is also known as the back end of your site.
From here, you can add or edit Posts, Publications, Staff Profiles, and Pages, as well as add images or videos to your Media Library.
Starting in the top left corner of the dashboard, you’ll see a house icon with your company name. Clicking on this icon will take you to what is known as the front end of the site, which is what your users see when they go to your website.
That’s all the main features of the dashboard. In other guides we will discuss the various functionality that were briefly outlined here in more detail.
We trust this guide has helped but if you have any questions, please get in touch at: support@practiceweb.co.uk