Starting Your Own Blog Part 4: Configuring WordPress

WordPress Settings:

Once you have your wordpress installed, login using the admin account and take a look around. The dashboard presents an overview of what’s going on your blog right now.

I’d recommend taking a look at each item under the Settings tab. At the very minimum, at least look at these:

Permalinks

First, the Permalinks. I use a custom structure. I want the links to reflect the category and post-name. So I use /%category%/%postname% as my permalink structure. Each post then can then be referred to as www.techiefather.com/recipes/hash-browns or something like that. It’s much better than www.techiefather.com/?p=123.

The importance of permalinks is huge. This little change can change the entire structure of how people see various blog posts, as well as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

General

Under General, you probably want to change the tagline. Also verify the rest of the settings on this page. Do you want to allow people to register on your website? Perhaps once you have guest bloggers this may be important. I don’t allow just anyone to register. I want to control the registration.

Writing

Under Writing, I like to have the size of the post box to be around 20 -25 lines. That gives more screen space to type your posts. Your posts can be anything in length, but the box to type them in is bigger.

Reading

Under Reading, you can choose your Front Page to be either the latest posts, or one static page. I would recommend having your latest posts shown, as that’s the main reason for a blog. Right?


Starting Your Own Blog Resources:

Here are a few pages of how to start your own blog. I originally had this in 3 parts, but decided it would be better broken down to more specific steps. I’ve also added a few other resources pages, such as camera and lighting pages, as well as general technology pages. These pages are most of the general steps in starting your own blog.

WordPress Pages
WP Part 1 – Domain Names WP Part 2 – Hosting WP Part 3 – WordPress (installation)
WP Part 4 – Configure WP WP Part 5 – Themes WP Part 6 – Plugins
WP Part 7 – Widgets WP Part 8 – Pages and Menus WP Part 9 – Posts and Categories

**DISCLAIMER: THERE MAY BE AFFILIATE LINKS ON THESE PAGES. If you buy from these vendors, I earn a small commission from them. Please support me by purchase with these links.

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