So you have created your new website and received the email with the login and password details. If you don’t receive the email then email me at andycarroll at thedeepstop.com and I will send you a new password.

You can login to your website by using the login link on the Deep Stop home page, or by typing the address [yoursitename].thedeepstop.com/wp-admin. Once logged in you will arrive at the dashboard, which has a few features which you may find useful.

Firstly you will immediately see the latest articles from Travel-Dive, and also the latest threads from Yorkshire-Divers, to keep you up to date without even visiting the sites. The dashboard also shows some useful information about your site, such as any incoming links, recent comments, your latest posts (articles) and a few stats, such as how many posts, comments and categories you currently have in your site, more about these later.

You will also see the menu at the top of the screen, which shows Dashboard, Write, Manage, Links, Presentation, Plugins, Users, Options and Import.

The first thing you might want to do is change your password to be one you already know, perhaps your YD password for example. To change this click on the Users link.

On this page you can update your password, and add some more details about yourself, such as First name, Last name, and even a short biography. This information can be displayed on your website if you wish. Once you are happy with any changes you can press the ‘update profile’ button in the bottom right corner. One little quirk is that the ‘Display name publicly as:’ dropdown box will only show the full range of options once you have updated your profile with you firstname and lastname. You can then choose how your name is to be displayed and update profile again.

One other little option you have is to untick the visual rich editor option. Leave it as it is for now, I’ll explain the effect of this in another article.

Looking at the top of the screen you can see the Authors and Users Tab. Clicking this tab brings you to the following page where you can view who is allowed to write posts and stuff on your website.

To begin with only your name is shown, and you are an administrator, ruler over your website. If you had started a site for your club, or a project site, then you can add other users from thedeepstop to your site. All you need to know is their username and then you can assign a ‘role’ to them. You cannot add users who have not created a website within the Deep Stop already, so anyone you want to help with the site needs to already have a site. The choices, in reverse order of importance, are subscriber, editor, author, contributor and administrator. I must admit I do not know all of the differences between these but I will find out and write an article on them later. For now you could just choose administrator or editor.

So there you are. How to login, change your password, and add a few personal settings. In the next article I shall discuss the look and feel of your website and ideas on how to organise the information so that it is easy to find for your visitors. If you have anything to add then comment below, or suggest another article and I’ll write it for you.