WordPress Settings

SettingsThere are a few basic WordPress settings that I like to change as I get started working on a new website. So login to your dashboard (yourwebsitename.wp-login.php). Settings is on the left near the bottom.
1. First link is General
a) You will notice WordPress Address and Site Address don’t have the www.
If you want to use that add it in. With the www. Or without is fine.
b) If you want a different email address for notifications you can change that.
c) Timezone – I finally realized that using a city with same time, that changed with daylight savings works the best, rather than the old UTC-8 that I used at first.
d) Be sure to Save Changes at bottom.
2. Writing and Reading links are fine for now.
3. Next is Discussion – uncheck the “Allow people to post comments on new articles” gives you the article by article control on comments.
4. I haven’t gotten into Avatars yet but they are on this page… Save changes
5. Media is fine as is.
6. Permalink Settings – very important to change from the default to Post Name, rather than identifying your pages and posts by a name this make the url the page/post name. Save Changes.

Okay now you have the basic settings on your new website set. The next blog will be on Appearance – What’s a Theme?

Login and Dashboard

WP DashboardSo you’ve loaded WordPress on your host server. Now What? If you got a free domain name with your hosting package you are all set to login to your WordPress Dashboard. If you purchased your domain name somewhere else, your registration company needs to point the domain name servers to the servers where your website is hosted. I’ll probably do a quick blog on this later – but for now a phone call to your hosting company will get you going.

OK – your website is “hot” and you want to login and start figuring out WordPress.

  1. Open an internet browser window, and in the address bar put your website name, forward slash /, wp-login.php   example http://yourwebsitename/wp-login.php    and hit enter
  2. Hopefully you wrote down your user name and password. It was also mailed to you when you put in the email to mail the Installation info to.
  3. When you hit Enter you will be on the latest WordPress Dashboard. If you had an older version at one time you may be delighted with how user friendly the new dashboard is. Lots of hover over lists.
  4. At the top left is “View website” – you can click on that to see what website looks like now.
  5. It is OK to look through all of these. In my next blog I will give you my suggested next step of changing a few Settings.