While WordPress is usually seen as the logical upgrade from hosted services such as Blogger due to its robust features and sheer customizability, there are those that would like to treat WordPress as “Blogger But With A Nicer Template”, meaning that all they want to do is write, write and write some more (without care of all the uber-plugins and theme customization). That’s fair enough given that using WordPress should primarily be about the writing aspect of blogging anyway.

So, if all you want to do is start writing, here’s one sequence you could follow:

1. Login: There are many ways to do this. One way is to login from the main page of your blog, but there are theme developers that decide to omit the login link.
   

   The screenshot is of blogHelper’s sidebar, where the left portion shows how it looks like before you login, and the right portion shows how it looks like after you login. But this usually isn’t the preferred way of logging in.

   Another way is to bookmark your WordPress login screen.

   

   Or, if you regularly login from the same computer(s), you could just as easily bookmark your Dashboard (as seen below), since checking the “Remember Me” checkbox during login will ensure that you won’t have to enter your user:password combination every time you enter your Dashboard.

   




2. Write: Now that you’re inside WordPress’ administrative interface, it’s time to start writing and publishing stuff. The first step is to enter the Writing interface, by clicking “Write” as seen in the screenshot above.
   

   You’ll reach the main interface for writing posts online (as seen above). Here, you should fill in the Title field with a suitable post title, and type out your post within the large variable-length Post field. If you’re using WordPress 2, you’ll have a pre-loaded WYSIWYG text editor at your disposal - which should simplify things in the beginning.

   Once that is done, you’ll have to set the Categories that the post will be filed in. In WordPress 2, you can even add new Categories on-the-fly, but you don’t have to if you don’t need new categories. If you’ve already entered categories in earlier posts, you’ll just have to select the old ones. Multiple categories can be selected (there’s no limit to the number of categories you can select).

   With all that done, what’s left is to actually Publish the post. To do this, just click the Publish button under the large Post field.

   

   You’ll probably have to wait a few seconds while WordPress does its stuff, and after that’s done, you’ll be sent to a new (and empty) Write page. And… that’s it. Your post has been published and you should be able to see it on the front page of your blog.

So, that’s Part 1. I know it only covers a really small percentage of WordPress, but it should be enough for anyone who wants to start writing posts right away. Part 2 will touch on post editing and category management.

If you found this post useful, keep updated with future posts by subscribing to blogHelper (for free) through RSS or email.