Welcome to Typepad! Or if you previously had a Typepad account and are starting up your blog again - welcome back! When you begin your free 14-day trial, the first place you go to is your Dashboard. This is where you can quickly access your blogs, account settings, profile settings, files, open a Help Ticket, view updates from other Typepad accounts you follow, and even purchase your own custom domain name if you continue with a paid Pro account.
Manage My Blog
Located on the top, right sidebar of your Dashboard, you can access specific settings to your new blog starting from here. As you add more blogs to your account, you will find more blog names listed in this box as well as the "Blogs" link in the top menu bar. From the "Blogs" menu, you can select the name of the blog to manage the settings of that blog.
View Blog: You can see what your blog looks like clicking "View Blog" under the thumbnail image. Right now, there is not much there, it is just a skeleton of what your blog could look like but you can design it to your liking.
Compose: If you want to get started blogging right away, you can access the Compose page by clicking the "Compose" link under "Manage My Blog". You will also see a yellow "Compose" button on every page within your blog settings.
Stats: This is your Overview tab. It displays analytics and referrals to your blog. The more you publish and share your blog post links elsewhere, the more data will appear on this page.
Posts: As you publish more posts, this list will grow. It displays all of your blog posts - published, and saved as drafts in chronological order. You can change the status of blog posts from Published to Draft or vice versa, or delete posts. You can select more than one posts to change their status by checking the box on the left of each title, then scroll to the bottom to publish, draft, or delete. You can also assign posts to categories, open and close comments from the drop-down menu on the bottom right.
Comments: If you use Typepad for your comments, you can view all comments left on your blog on this tab. You can reply, edit and view comments directly from this page. You can also publish, unpublish, delete, and mark comments as spam.
Design: Typepad has many pre-made designs you can easily apply to your blog or you can customize your own design using Design Lab or Theme Builder. In "Create a New Design" click the green "Choose a theme..." button and select a theme from our gallery.
Settings: This is where you create the backend settings to your blog including your blog name and description, welcome message (optional), whether you want to create password protection, search engine optimization, category creation, comment configuration, post-by-email, and more.
A word about Getting Started Tasks
There is a drop-down menu on the right of your Dashboard titled Getting Started Tasks. These can be completed at your own time while you are blogging. The Getting Started Tasks on the Dashboard are only suggestions, and you do not need to complete all tasks in order to utilize all the features of Typepad.
Stay tuned for more Typepad 101 blog posts on how to get started with your blog and publishing your posts!