After you have successfully installed WordPress, installed and activated your theme and you understandhow to properly organize your WordPress content, you’re ready to configure your WordPress options.
NOTE: The following screenshots are from WordPress 2.8.4, the latest version of WordPress at the time this post was written.
Login to your WordPress admin area (www.yourdomainname/wp-admin) and we’ll go through the options tabs one-by-one from left to right. Keep in mind you will have to revisit some of these after installing certain plug-ins.
Posts |
| NEW WORDPRESS INSTALLS ONLY: Delete the default post title “Hello World” |
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Pages |
| Even if you don’t have all of your content yet go ahead and create all of the “static” pages for your blog. (i.e. About Us, Contact, Privacy Policy, etc…) |
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Categories |
| Now, let’s create all of the main categories for your blog using your primary keywords as much as possible in each. In addition to creating new categories you will also want to change the default category. This list doesn’t have to be comprehensive. You can always come back later and add more. |
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Link Categories |
| If you choose to use Links / Blog Roll, delete or change the default link category to one that matches your niche. Add other link categories that may apply. |
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Manage Links |
| For now you can either delete all links in the blogroll or you can add a few links to other well respected blogs related to your topic. While this may sound counter intuitive it’s not. Remember, blogging is about community and it’s never a bad thing to be associated with leaders in your market even if it just means linking to them.
Later, if you create some reciprocal linking agreements, you can add links to those sites here.
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Settings | General |
 Blog Title: Make sure your blog Title contains your main keyword / phrase twice. We’ll go into greater detail on how to tweak this when we talk about the All-in-One SEO plug-in below. This one tweak can result in much better search engine rankings. (Ex: Dog Breeding Tips From Dog Breeding Expert Bubba Jones)
Tagline: The tagline may not be important depending on your theme setup but, go ahead and include it anyway. Again, be sure to include your primary keywords in the tagline.
WordPress address (URL): DO NOT Change this. It will “break” your blog!
Blog address (URL): DO NOT Change this. It will “break” your blog!
E-mail address: Enter the email address for the admin of this blog. This is the address where all comment notifications and form info, by default, will be sent.
Membership: Leave these unchecked unless you want people registering for your blog. Most likely you will not want them subscribing here. Instead you will want them subscribing to your RSS feed and email list which we’ll cover in the plug-ins section.
New User Default Role: Unless you have a specific plan for this and really know what you’re doing Select Subscriber. If you are NOT allowing people to register this really won’t matter.
Click Save Changes
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Settings | Writing |
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| Default post category: Select the category you want to be the default.
Post via e-mail: Leave as is
Update Services: Copy and paste the following list into the form field.
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping http://api.moreover.com/ping http://api.moreover.com/RPC2 http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc/ http://coreblog.org/ping/ http://ping.blo.gs/ http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/ http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/ http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2 http://topicexchange.com/RPC2 http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2 http://xping.pubsub.com/ping http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
Click Save Changes
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Settings | Reading |
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Save Changes
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Settings | Discussion |
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| Usual settings for an article: I usually check all 3
E-mail me whenever: I usually check both of these especially, on new blogs so, I will be notified of any new comments and respond quickly.
Before a comment appears: I usually check the middle option only. If I start to get a lot of undesirable comments then I may tighten it up a little by requiring that all comments be approved. But remember the idea is to get interaction and build community so the easier the communication the better. Plus, we’ll address comment spam in the plug-ins section below.
Comment Moderation: This feature is mainly used to help control comment Spam. While it is helpful there are better ways to deal with comment Spam. I’ll discuss those later in the plug-ins section.
Comment Blacklist: This one’s pretty self explanatory. Just think of all the bad words you don’t want showing up on your blog and start typing them in.
Save Changes
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Settings | Privacy |
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| Blog visibility: Check that you want your blog visible to everyone including search engines.
Save Changes
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Settings | Permalinks |
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Not only are the WordPress default permalinks ugly and non seneschal, they don’t help you much with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Therefore, I like to change mine to the following: /%category%/%postname%or just /%postname% Here’s How:
Click here for a comprehensive list of other Permalink tags you can use.
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| NOTE: If your Permalink Structure will not update make sure your .htaccess file permissions are set to minimum of “644″ (You do this using your FTP program or cPanel) |
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