In this Part III of the series for new bloggers, let’s look inside WordPress 2.7 at some of the basic settings. Look for a time-saving tip at the end of this post.
- General — This section is for setting up your blog title and tagline. You will want both of these to contain the keywords you are targeting. Also set your timezone on this page.
- Writing — This section has settings to customize how you write and post your blog posts. For example, you can enlarge the editing box by setting the “size of post box” to a larger number. After you set up some categories for your posts, you can come back here and set the default category.
- Reading — This is an important section for determining which page will become your “home page”. Most blog sites’ home page contains the most recent posts, but if you have a static page you would rather use such as a sales or pre-sell page, you can select that here. You will also set the number of posts that will appear on the home or posts page and how many will be in your RSS feed.
- Discussion — This section controls how comments on your blogs are handled. You decide if comments are allowed and by whom and what information commenters must provide. I would suggest that you check the box “An administrator must always approve the comment” which will allow you to delete spam before it posts. You will also want to activate the Akismet plug-in which will look for spam comments.
- Media — Controls the default sizes of post images. You probably will not need to change these settings.
- Privacy Settings — Leave the default setting here to allow the search engines to find you.
- Permalinks — This is an important section to change. This controls the URL of each post. The default is ugly like http://yoursite.com/?p=5. Instead select the custom structure box and use /%category%/%postname%/ which will produce http://yoursite.com/blogging/how-to-blog or use /%postname%/ which will result in http://yoursite.com/how-to-blog.
- Miscellaneous — You probably can keep the default for this section.
Time Saver: If you want a very easy 3-step installation of a WordPress blog fully configured and customized, my friend Alex Sysoef has a very simple and free system that will get you up and running in minutes. I recommend you check out Expert WordPress.
In the next blog, I’ll look at some cool WordPress plug-ins.
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