Weblog Tools Collection has a great post explaining all the in’s and out’s of the WordPress Dashboard — the first screen you see after logging into the blog. In addition to the overview below, they full post explains how you can customize the dashboard by changing the number of columns of widgets, dragging and dropping the order or widgets, and modifying the content of the widgets.

WordPress provides users with a really nice dashboard that will allow you to manage and perform several actions, however the first thing that you see when you login to WordPress is a screen as you see below (click to enlarge), lets explore that, I have marked the screen with numbers and will explain what each of it means accordingly.

When you first login to the WordPress admin, you will see a lot of information, sometimes this can be overwhelming, however we will decipher it here.

#1 – This is basically a place where you will see the name of the site and a option to visit your blog homepage.

#2 – You will see the name of the person who has logged in, and an option to logout, in addition to that you will also see quick links to perform several actions on WordPress.

#3 – The sidebar, this is a place from where you can perform several actions including writing new posts, editing them, managing plugins and users and more, all of which I will cover in future posts in this series.

#4 In this section you can change screen options and find help with problems, I will cover screen options detail in this post, to learn more about finding help read a earlier post Troubleshooting problems with WordPress.

#5 This section provides information about statistics about your blog with information such as number of posts, number of drafts, number of comments and so on.

#6 QuickPress is a easy and quick way to publish posts and images to your blog, again will be covered in detail in future posts.

#7 A easy way to keep an eye on comments, moderate them and reply to them.

#8 If you have posted drafts it will show up here, drafts are basically posts, however they have not been published to the blog, we will explore them in detail later.

#9 On this section you will see the latest news from the WordPress development blog.

#10 When someone links to you it is a really good thing, however you don’t have to visit each and every site on the internet to find out who linked to you, this section will query Google and display the latest incoming links to your blog, you can change it to query some other blog tracking source, we will see how to do that in this post.

#11 Information about plugins that add to the features provided by WordPress, includes most popular, newest and latest updated plugins. I will do a dedicated post on plugins later in this series.

#12 In this section you will see news from the WordPress community, you can directly subscribe to it too in your RSS reader, the website to subscribe is Planet WordPress.

#13 This is the footer area and has links to main WordPress site and also tells you which version of WordPress you are using.

via Touring and Understanding the WordPress Dashboard | Weblog Tools Collection.