Welcome to Steemit

This post is for first time users new to steemit. Before making your page look nice let's jump to passwords and password protection. There are two keys you will use for most of your actions on steemit. Your posting key, and your active key. These are keys and passwords and you do not want to lose them. The really important key/password to not lose is your master key.

If you can not quite read the text on the images you can right click on the "Big Picture" and choose open in a new window to see a larger easier to read picture.

Big Picture
After you click the wallet button this is the page you will see:
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It defaults to your balances page, click on the Password button/link.

Read the information on this page very carefully. Very Carefully, Very, very Carefully, Very, very, very, Carefully read this page.

Big Picture I really really hope you read that page and understand what it said.

Now for the passwords and permissions page.

Big Picture
Okay, admittedly it is a confusing page. It still confuses me. I am still not sure of the purpose of the public keys so let's just ignore them for now. You want to get your Private Posting, and Private Active keys. These are the two keys you will use most often on steemit, so you want them handy, but you also want them easy to access. You could just make a notepad file called My Steemit Keys, not a smart file name, easy for strangers to find, so make a file but give it an off the wall name or something that you would know what the file holds but a stranger would not.

Making it look Pretty

The banner, it is what everyone is going to see when they navigate to your page. Some are plain, some are ugly, some are easy to read, some are impossible to read. This is all personal likes for you, and it is the first impression people are going to get about you when they look at your banner. So let's break it down, click on the Settings button next to Wallet.

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1. Public Profile Picture. This is the little ICON that is going to be associated with you. it should be at least 200X200. Steemit will take any size picture I think, but you will not have very much control over what is used. It will take the center part of the picture I think. So it is best to take the part of the picture you want to use as an Icon and crop it and save it at 200X200 at least. There are people on steemit that will make nice icons for you, most of them do charge for making them though.
2. The banner background picture, (they call it the Cover image), should be about 2000X200 in size. so you can use a paint program to really go all creative like some of the people do, or you can crop out a part of a picture that looks nice and use it. One thing to remember, you have no control over the color of the font that sits on top of the cover image, so a completely white background could be annoying to some people.
3. Display Name. Pretty much type whatever you want it there. Any name will do. Most people are going to refer to you in comments by your Steemit user name and not what is here. Your Steemit username is your "@" name example for me it is @bashadow. Changing the Display Name will have no effect on your steemit user name.

Next Step

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1. About: you can put a little message here about, well just about anything. This is the information that will be displayed on the banner under you Display Name.
2. Location: Use a little bit of common sense here, don't put your real street address, there are some bad people in the world. You can put your town, your state, your country, or whatever you like there. Me I use: under a full moon. So pretty much where ever you feel like being from, I am sure I have seen someone from planet X and from wolf 459, have fun. Steemit can be used to have a lot of fun.
3. Web Site: You can place any internet link here you want. A link to another site of yours, or a link to a favorite site you like, or pretty much any link you want to put there.
4. Update Button: When you are all done making your changes you click this and it updates the setting for you. It will take a little bit of time for the changes to show up. If you get impatient, you can try a CTRL + F5 page reload, but it will update in time by itself.

Here comes the End

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1. Not Safe For Work (NSFW) Content: Pretty much what it says. If you do not want to be embarrassed by iffy images, or you have kids that may look over your shoulder, here is where you choose if you do not want them displayed.
2. Blog/Post rewards and Comment rewards Box: I pretty much just stay at the 50/50 level. What this means is that my wallet will slowly have some "Liquid" assets, and some that are powered up and saved. This provides the most flexibility. Plus I really do not know much yet about the world of cryptocurrencies. I have not let that lack of knowledge prevent me from enjoying steemit as a social media.
3. Muted users: This is where you will see who you have muted. When you mute someone you do not see them, or comments from them on the steemit front end access to the steem blockchain. Other people may ask why you did not respond or why you did not flag or why you did not blah blah blah to so and so person, if you see that kind of question, then just respond if you feel like it, I must have them muted. There are a lot of what are referred to, lately, as bad actors, or better known as trolls. Not so many trolls on steemit as other areas, but there are still some people that you may want to mute at some point, and this is where you would see who you muted.

Well that pretty much covers making your banner look like you have been on steemit for awhile, as you drift around steemit you will find people you want to follow, and people as they drift around will find you and may follow you, those numbers on your banner will grow over time.

There are a lot of places/organizations/people that are willing to try and help new users out. When you do your first introduceyourself post you will get several automated helper responses, and some real people helpers. Speaking of your Introductory Post, I would suggest looking at some of the entries in the #introduceyourself tag. Look under the new button, ignore the trending button for now, and look mostly at those that have a reputation of 35 or less. They are the real new users. That number (like in the mid twenties for you), next to your name "bashadow (60)" is your reputation score. So read a few of those post and see how they handled it. You also want to be careful about using the #introduceyourself tag more than once.

Well that is enough information for now to digest, if you have any questions just drop a comment below. Due to the nature of the steem blockchain, even if this post is a year old, if it is still found and you have a question one year later, drop a comment I will get a notification of the comment.

^{Check-in every now and then at @steemUSA, they may have a new Monday Photo or Thursday thought post.}

^{Check @photocircle for their latest "The Best of Photocircle Contributors" who knows one day you may see me listed there.}