So you’ve got an idea and you are going to start a blog. You’ve dug through the different blog platforms and landed upon WordPress. Once you either get your WordPress.com blog running, or you have installed WordPress on your server, you will no doubt be ready to start typing away. That’s great! Before you start publishing your award winning content there may be a few things you will want to take a look at to get your WordPress site looking like it’s a step above the rest.
Setup your user profile
By default a WordPress installation uses the name ‘admin’ and that crazy password that get’s emailed to the address you provided. If you don’t change this, all of our future posts will be attributed to ‘admin’. Once you get logged in with that password, you will want to go to the ‘Users’ menu from the left bar in your Dashboard and select ‘Your Profile’. Here you can change your username to start.
Using ‘admin’ can be a security danger as well since it’s the default username and will no doubt be what people attempting to gain access to your site will try. The next section that I recommend you customize is the ‘Nickname’ field. Yeah I know it’s required, but what you type here can be used in the next section of ‘Display name publicly as’ can use your nickname. This is what will show when you publish a post.
Past this change, I only recommend 2 more alterations on this settings page. The ‘Biographical info’ and update the password so you don’t have to remember that crazy one. The Biographical info will be used on some themes that include this at the bottom of a blog post written by you. A note on the password, keep it secure. A combination of case sensitive letters, numbers, and at least one special character (the ones above the numbers) should be sufficient as long as it’s no shorter than 8 characters long.
Define your categories
Your categories are what is used to help a visitor filter out what they would like to read about. Using descriptive and relevant categories will help not only your visitor but you as well. In my opinion it’s best to keep posts attributed to only a single category.
To help you keep your categories list minimal and clean, before you even write your first post, create a list of 3-5 categories that you will likely be writing about. Remember, you aren’t limiting yourself because you can add categories later. By adding some categories now, you won’t get caught making a huge list of categories without realizing it. It’s easy to do this if you add new categories with every new post. If you want to somehow relate posts, use ‘Tags’ instead. Categories are defined within the ‘Posts’ menu in the Dashboard.
Determine your Permalink Structure
We have all been to a blog that, when visiting a page, the address bar looked something like http://somedomain.com/?p=34. Not only is this not descriptive, but it’s not user friendly, and not SEO friendly.
I prefer to use WordPress’ built in ‘Day and Name’ or ‘Month and Name’ however some people will use the ‘Custom Structure’ and only use the post name as the structure. This is all fine and well, but my reason for including the date in the permalink structure is for usability. If someone finds my posts via search, I would prefer they know when the post was published before visiting and since the search will show this URL, the will know if this content may possibly not be relevant anymore. You can update this by going to the ‘Settings’ menu and choosing ‘Permalinks’.
So these tips should help you get your site configured the way you want it from the start. These are not only important to help your viewers but it’s important to do this before the search engines start crawling your site. I hope these help and good luck with your new WordPress site!
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