Kim Avery Coaching

WordPress Settings – How To Do Stuff in WordPress

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When you are setting up your blog or website, the WordPress Settings area has several functions that are critical to your success. The settings menu can be accessed at or near the bottom of the left sidebar, and it looks like this.

Once you have added plugins, your WordPress Settings menu may grow, but these seven default categories should still be at the top.

In this post I’ll give you a brief overview of each of the WordPress Settings categories and tell you why you should care about it.

General

Site Title and Tagline –This is where you change what displays as the title of your site and your tagline. When your site was brand-spankin’ new, the tagline that was displayed was “Just another WordPress site.” This is where you change that.

WordPress Address and Site Address — Don’t mess with these. They are the location of your website files.

Email Address — This is the email address where all of the WordPress notifications go. If you plan to do the bulk of the work on your site going forward, make sure your email address is there, and not the designer’s.

Timezone/Date/Time — Here is where you set your location and preferences for how date and time display.

Writing

Size of the post box — When you create a page or post, this determines the default size of the editing area (the box where you type in the content). If you want it to always display more space, you can change the number of lines it shows here. You can also just grab the bottom right corner of the box and drag it to resize it manually.

Default Post Category — When you write a post, this determines the category to which it is automatically assigned. By default, that is “Uncategorized.” Meh. Choose your most frequently used category, and then if you forget to change it, you’ll still have a pretty good chance of getting it right. Nobody likes to see posts that are uncategorized.

Other options — there are also more advanced options you can set for posting via email and through aps.

Reading Options

Front Page Displays — There are two options for the main content of the home page of your website. It can either display your most recent blog posts, or it can display static content. This is where you make that choice. By default, it displays your latest posts. When you create a static home page, this is where you will go to make that show up.

Blog pages show at most — This is where you set the number of posts that display on your blog page. If you are showing the full text, you will want fewer posts to show up than if you are just showing excerpts.

Discussion

Comment Settings — This is where you can decide what you will require of those people who want to post comments to your blog posts, and what the comment section will look like. For example…

  • Do you want comment authors to have to give their name and email? Do they have to be registered and logged into your site to comment?
  • How long to do you want to leave articles open for commenting?
  • Do you want the comments to be nested – replies are indented? How about replies to replies?
  • Do you want older or newer comments at the top?
  • Do you want to be notified whenever somebody comments?
  • Do you want an administrator to always approve comments? My choice on this one is that once I have approved a comment by a person, their new comments appear without being held for approval.

Media

This section helps you determine the size of images and where they are stored. I usually go with the defaults on this one.

Privacy

Site Visibility — You have two options here:

  • Allow search engines to index this site – when your site is ready to go public, make sure this is checked so the Search Engines will crawl your site and index your pages.
  • Ask Search Engines not to index this site — You may want to mark this as you have your site in development.

Permalinks

This is where you determine what the URL of each page and post looks like. By default, it is set up as www.YourAmazingSite.com/p=123. That means that every page and post is assigned a number, and that is what shows up in the address bar. That’s not very search engine friendly, however if your goal is anonymity, this may be a good plan.

If, however, you are hoping to get found, my suggestion is to go with “Post name” as your setting. When you choose this option, WordPress automatically uses the words in your page or post title and separates them with hyphens. You can see that if you look at the URL on this page.

As always, if you have any questions or comments about WordPress settings, I would love to see them!

 

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