To get consistent screen work areas,
I find it best to use Saved views.
(Some don't use them)
I've posted an image of basic flow.
What I haven't shown is 1st set up your
layer combos (at the very least) from the layers dialog, because you will certainly want to have one of those per Saved view in the View Map as shown as 1.
"I don't understand what you mean by profile"
After logging in you will see that you can select a tab called Profile
to the left of your log in name.
This is where you can fill in some info about yourself and computer specs,
version, build etc, or as you so feel.
(A couple of advanced users can get a bit grumpy over neglecting this).
It help folks get the the right answer for you in some cases.
lec