First things first, welcome to LiveJournal. It's a great place to express yourself, keep in touch with friends and family, meet new people, and share your interests with others. You've already created a journal... now what? This guide will help you along.
#1 -The login box. Whenever you're not logged in, this will appear. You can tell your browser to "Remember me" and it'll save the password for you. Of course, if you change your password, you'll need to change it in your browser, too. When you login, there are two ways to save the login-- by binding it to your IP address (which should never change if you pick this option), or by your browser just "remembering" the username and password based on the website, as mentioned before.
#2 - This may look different depending on when you visit the homepage, and if you signed up for a "beta" testing of a new style of the homepage. But either way, the homepage when you're NOT logged in typically shows the features of LJ and some "Spotlight" communities. You can click on the links (the blue names) to see the communities, and if you want, join them.
Once you're logged in, the page will change a bit. It may not look like this. This page style is called "Vertigo," and it's a beta-test of LiveJournal's. But generally, the menus are the same, just located in different places. The most basic parts are here on the homepage:
#1 - The toolbar. You see your username, your account options (Account; if it has an arrow going up, that means you can "upgrade" your account), Logout, Post to your Journal, Messages (you can be notified when someone comments on a post you've made, when someone replies to a comment you've made somewhere, when someone friends you, etc.), Friends Page (where you'll read other people's/community entries), Invite (invite your friends), and Mobile (access LiveJournal from your phone; make voice posts from your phone from ANYWHERE in the world).
The lower part of the toolbar (here, in dark blue) gives you the option to go to the homepage, check out the Site Map in case you're lost, change your homepage viewing options (see image below), or search the Help/FAQ for answers to your questions. If you're trying to find a specific user, community, etc., you can do it by using the search box/drop-down combo on the far right.
VIEWING OPTIONS - You can see samples of the homepage (logged in version) in different styles. They go in order of age-- Horizon is the newest, followed by XColibur. Dystopia is older, and Lynx is for those people who are on dinosaur-aged modems and don't want to wait for things like images, Java, and CSS to load. You can also change your language, and the navigation strip (see below):
Your Navigation Bar (if you have it enabled) may look different (color-wise, usually). The Nav Bar will appear on all your journal's pages. You can also force it to be visible to your friends, even if they don't have it enabled in their options. Sometimes the Nav Bar makes layouts (custom designed ones, usually) look a bit strange, so be wary before you enable it. Still, it's very handy for quick access to posting in your Journal, your Friends Page, and your various options.
Below the Nav Bar options on the Viewing Options page, you can also choose to use Image or Video placeholders, view your Comment pages in your own Journal's style (the same look as the rest of your journal), Contextual Hover Menu (when you hover over things like someone else's LiveJournal userpic or name), Online Status (sort of like instant messaging; you can show up as "Online" or "Offline" to those who might message you using LJ's LJTalk system), and the Getting Started module.
You can also receive email notifications of LiveJournal news, and choose to have your journal included in search engines and/or the weblogs.com update.
#2 - Your user icon (user pics). You can have hundreds of these, depending on your account level. The requirement is that they must be NO larger than 100 x 100 pixels, and no more than 40 KB in size. People use their icons to express themselves. You can also pick a "default" that shows up whenever you don't specify a particular icon. If you click on this, you'll be taken to the page where you can see your userpics, change their keywords and comments, and upload more.
#3 - Your menu. As previously mentioned, it may look different. But the areas are the same:
JOURNAL - view your journal (as other people see it), post an entry, edit an entry you've already posted, customize your journal's appearance, manage the way you receive comments, and manage tags. We'll go into those last three in a later section of this guide.
PROFILE - Your profile is what introduces you to others, before they read your journal. It's good to say a little about yourself, your interests, and so on, in your profile. You can view your profile, edit your profile, manage your userpics, manage your schools (that you've gone to, so people can find you based on that), and your Memories (entries of yours or others that you've found significant or interesting).
FRIENDS - Most people read their Friends Page to keep up. A friends page shows all the entries of your friends, and communities you're in, in date order. The most recent entries will always be at the top, and you can customize your journal's layout so it shows a certain number of entries on the friends page. Many people have security preferences set up, so unless you're logged in, you won't be able to see their entries. So make sure to log in when you view your Friends Page, or you may miss out!
If you have some of these security filters (and we'll talk about how to set them up later), you can view a "filtered" friends page (Filter Friends Page). Let's say you join a bunch of communities, and you only want to read community entries. You can set up a group that includes ONLY communities, so you can "filter" your Friends Page and just read those, without any other entries from single users.
If you want to add or remove a friend, you can do that by clicking on Manage Friends. You can arrange your friends and community memberships into Custom Groups, and you can always invite new friends. LiveJournal is free!
COMMUNITIES - Communities are almost the backbone of LiveJournal. For every interest, there's a LiveJournal community for it. Communities differ from single users in that:
You can post an entry to a community (you can also do this from the Update Journal link; you just have to change the Post To... option. But we'll show that later), manage your invitations to communities (when people invite you to join a community), membership in communities you've already joined, or create a brand new community!
SCRAPBOOK - Scrapbook is a service of LiveJournal's for paid/permanent/early adopter users only. But for some, it's well-worth it! You get a ton of space to host pictures in, and you can organize them into albums. You can also "tag" them (for example, by subject), the same way you can tag your LiveJournal entries. If you have a Paid Account, Scrapbook is just one of many features that will be enabled for you. You can View Pictures, Upload Pictures, Manage Galleries, Manage Tag Galleries, and Customize ScrapBook.
FIND - Since you're new to LJ, consider having some fun with this section. You can Explore LiveJournal by interest (find other users and communities interested in the same things you are... for example, "anime," "photography," or "cooking"), by community (search for a specific community using particular criteria), region (state or country), by school (find old classmates!), and more. Be sure to check all of them out-- you'll be surprised at what you find!
LIVEJOURNAL - You can buy all sorts of goodies in the gift shop-- from journal upgrades to extra userpics, hoodies and baby tees to baseball caps. There are event "virtual gifts" like roses that will appear on someone else's profile if you give one to them! Be sure to also check out the Downloads page (if you want to use a client to post to your journal; the best ones I've used are Semagic for Windows and Phoenix for Mac OSX), Upgrade Account (this is obvious...), or, if you really need to get ahold of the People In Charge, "Contact Us."
#4 - News. You'll see the latest news when you log in. It's pretty handy to know what's going on with LiveJournal, especially if they're rolling out new features, such as extra userpics, more voice post numbers, additional journal styles, and more. Sometimes they want your commentary on ideas they have, and you might even be able to win things! So stay on top of the news!
#5 - Spotlight. Like on the home page (when you weren't logged in), a section may be devoted to spotlight communities. Click on them to check them out, or nominate another community for the Spotlight. Also check out LJ's amazing statistics, and if you're feeling brave, read an RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed of the most recently-updated journals!