On the front page of your newly created site is a welcome message which explains some options. It's all very well and good what is said on this page and worth your time to read. The important thing is the link named 'Administer'. This link leads you into the land of Drupal Administration.
But first, a word about user permissions on Drupal. Drupal allows there to be multiple users registered with a site. There are a range of permissions available to grant, and these permissions are very finely detailed allowing the site administrator to precisely control what their users can do. The important thing to know is that the "first user" is special. This first user is the account created during the initial setup of the drupal site. The first user account has all powers on the site, can make any change, etc, regardless of any permissions setting. In creating a blogging site for Drupal it could be configured to support one blogger, or multiple bloggers, and you can change your mind at any time. Access to the first user account should be limited due to the scope of its power.
Upon entering the Administer section you're shown a list of many names with explanations of their purpose. Each of these names is the configuration screen for one aspect of the Drupal system. It's worth your while to ponder these names and explanations and familiarize yourself with some of them. Administer Drupal goes into this in more depth.
The Administer section is divided into major categories:-
- Content Management: Control and configuration of the content, content types vocabularies, and more on the site
- Site Building: Configuration of the overall structure and theme of the site
- Site Configuration: More general configuration and settings
- User management: The list of users, the roles users can have, permissions granted to users
- Reports: Status information about the site, recent activity, etc