Site Basics
Currently, you must have permission and already be set up as a user in the DS Multisite. (read: talk to Jim or Nate) Then you just follow these instruction. Once important component of first making a site is setting your privacy settings. You can edit these at anytime in Settings > Reading.
Themes
You can change your theme at anytime, but there are certain functionalities that differ slightly between the themes. This means you might have to do a little bit of clean up each time after switching. Luckily, you can live preview your site under Appearances > Themes. If your site now looks weird and you dont’ know why, check your navigation menu. A common difference is that some themes look better with a custom menu in the header area widget. You can change the color, text, and other things in your site through design palette pro. Before you start changing a bunch of stuff, in Settings > Theme Defaults choose the theme you are using. Sometimes DPP is glitch-y and it is sometimes hard to know what your are changing. You can clear all the changes if your site gets funky, under Settings > Reset. (Note: not reversible!)
Menus
Under Appearances > Menus just click and add Pages, Links, or Categories (there are others, but these are the most common). You may want to add a menu item that doesn’t go anywhere and is just a stationary header for a submenu. Simply type a pound sign in the custom link URL. If you add a category to your menu, this will navigate to a scrolling feed of your posts in that category. Depending on your theme, your main navigation can be added by either checking the Primary Navigation box or adding this menu to the header widget (see next category!). You also may make menus that are not for primary navigation and are for a project landing page. You will make this menu the same way, except see these instructions to add the menu to just the pages you want it to appear on!
Widgets
Widgets are kind of like bonus content to add to areas, like the sidebar, footers, or headers, on your site. On the widgets page under Appearances, you will see available widgets and content areas that you can drag them into. In general, if you add content to these areas, they will show up on every page. If you want widgets to show up on only certain pages, like a thesis project, you will create a new content area in Genesis > Simple Sidebars.
Plugins
Plugins let you do exciting things to extend the functionality of your site. We have installed many of the basic plugins like sliders, but you can go to this page to activate more. iframe is one of these plugins that you can use to embed interesting content in you site.
Comments
Under Settings > Discussion you can change how readers interact with your site via comments. You can also edit some if the comments settings under Genesis > Theme Settings. There is much, much more about comments here! This page will explain a little about managing comments.