Better Know a Button #1
This feature’s title is totally and completely ripped off from NoFactZone, but since we host them and we do it for free, we’re hoping they won’t mind. (One day we need to blog how they wound up here because its kind of interesting, but that day is not today.)
“Better Know a Button” is exactly that - instead of giving you a broad overview of something you can do with your cPanel that involves lots of buttons, we’ll pick one button (or sub-button) and explain it. Today’s blog post is sponsored by the button “Getting Started Wizard”.
It’s the very first button in your control panel, and probably the button that’s most often overlooked. When you click on it, it says:
Welcome to your web hosting account for yourdomain.com. This software allows you to manage all different aspects of your web site, including your files, security, email, web applications, and a whole lot more. This getting started wizard will introduce you to some of the concepts behind web hosting and allow you to configure some basic settings for your web site so that you can start bringing traffic (visitors) to your site. At any time, you can use the jump menu to skip ahead to the next section.
This section will give you an introduction to some very important concepts in web hosting, including the most basic of concepts - your file structure. We know for a fact that hardly any of you watch this because we can see which files are accessed when you sign in - we also take the tickets that people inevitably submit because they never went through this section and aren’t very familiar with just exactly how a web site is set up. If we had a $1.00 for every ticket we answered explaining to people that they uploaded their index file into their home directory and that’s why it’s not web accessible (i.e. you can’t see it), we’d have as much money as Dreamhost without the server overhead.
In addition to general file structure overviews, it gives you a rundown of the features your account has, including Webdisk, cPanel’s alternative to WebDav on Microsoft servers (and the way that those of you who publish with Frontpage and are lost without the extensions can still hold on to your old, decrepit, end-of-lifed software while making a little bit of a jump into modernity).
It will take you through setting your contact information, telling you about different features of the hosting account, and in some cases, providing a way for you to set up those features right from the overview. It will also show you the different skins you have available and let you pick one, if you don’t like the default.
If you’re unfamiliar with servers and file structures, this is an excellent way to get familiar with your web site. Regardless of whether you think you need to know about all that kind of stuff, there will come a day when you will - we guarantee it. 
