WordPress Settings – Step 4
We love WordPress because it is truly designed for the non-techie in mind. While initially some of the instructions we provide might seem hard to understand, over time, you will see just how easy WordPress is to use.
When you visit a website you will see a title of the site and many times a “tag line” on the top of the browser. Some websites also post the time and date for articles posted. In this step we’re going to show you how to add and revise the information as needed.
So lets get started:
- Sign into your WordPress website at http://www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin using the user name and password that you chose when setting up your site in Step 3. This is not the same as the user/password for BlueHost. It is the username and password you established when you installed WordPress.
What you see:
- The first screen you see is called the “dashboard” and this is the main screen for your website. It is basically the control panel for your website.
- If you look down the left side of the page you will see categories entitled Posts, Media, Links, Pages Comments, Appearance, Plugins, Users, Tools and Settings.
- Posts are the articles that you post to your site, while Pages are those pages that stay static. For example “About Us” would be a page and “How to Buy Flowers” would be a Post. We’ll provide the explanation of the rest of the terms later.
- In the middle and right of the page you will see some statistics on what content is posted on your site, information about WordPress and a Quickpress box to add a fast post.
What you need to do:
- Now let’s focus on the link that says “Settings” Please click on that link.
- You are now in the General Settings page and this is where you need to fill in the Name of your website, add a tag line (“the best cigars in the west”), the web address of your site-make sure you use the http:// part (ie: http://www.yoursite.com) and the WordPress address-use the same entry here as the web address, your email address (this is not public and is VERY important as this is where the site will mail you your password if you lose it), adjust the time zone and choose a date and time format and then click “save changes” at the bottom of the page.
- Now under settings click on the “permalinks” link.
- Under “common settings” and in the box next to the “custom structure” statement copy and paste this exactly like it is: /%postname%/
This will set the urls for each post to include the name of the article. (www.mysite.com/myarticle).
For example if your article is called “dog training” the url for that article will automatically be set to http://www.mysite.com/dog_training. This is very good for search engines like Google finding and indexing your pages.
If you want a special url for an article it is easy to edit the url when you publish the article. But with this setting you should not have to do anything additional for most of your posts.
That’s it! You’re done!