Choosing Your Blog Settings and Theme

You’ve installed wordpress on your domain and now you ‘re ready to get started. The first thing you want to do is get your settings set to the right thing.

Settings is where your on page SEO efforts start ~ yep, before you even type a word of a post you are going to get started on your on page SEO. (search engine optimization).

First let’s get logged into our site.

www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin This address ~ (with your real domain and whatever extension you got (.com/.net/.org) will get you to your log in page.

For the mountain bike site it will be

www.mountainbikeforsale.net/wp-admin

Simply fill in the username and password for the site. You chose this when you were installing wordpress. Once you log in you will be at your dashboard. This is like the command center of your blog ~ this is where you can do EVERYTHING from.

A word of warning though…

wordpress is upgrading and changing its service ALL the time ~ to make it better, easier, friendlier, safer ~ whatever. The images you see today may not be the images in your dashboard (depending on what version of wordpress your hosting has) and it probably won’t be the same images a month or two from now. With that being said ~ it’s all the same stuff it just may look a little different. When I started with wordpress all the links to stuff were across the top of the page ~ now they are along the left hand sidebar ~ heck next week they could be in the footer for all I know.

No matter where they are ~ it’s all going to be the same.

So today we are going to make sure our settings are set the way we want them. So we’re going to go to the settings link, which today, for me, is located along the left hand sidebar of the page.

You will notice it is just a word for each category, but if you click the category word you will see there is an arrow and more options will open up.

Once you’ve got all your settings options open you’re ready to get started.

Let’s start with the first option:  general ~ which should already be open and in front of you.

Fill in or change your blog title.

You want your title to match what your blog content is going to be, but you also want it to have some good keywords in it. You can incorporate a couple keywords in the title ~ but don’t go overboard or it will look spammy. We are creating a quality site people will look at as an excellent resource.

Fill in your tagline (if you didn’t do it during installation)

You want to make a brief description of what the site is going to be about. For the mountain bike site I am going to say

Buy used mountain bikes and find great deals on mountain bikes for sale.

You’re just going to fill in your description. It doesn’t have to be perfect ~ you can change it later, and don’t make this super complicated ~  just give people an idea of what your site is going to be about.

Blog address:

You want to add the www. into both of the addresses here. Once you save this page it will log you out and ask for you to log back in ~ that’s normal, you just changed the address of your blog.

So once you’ve done that your addresses will look like this: (with your information in there of course)

Email address:

The email address should be there already ~ but if you decide you want to use a different one you can change it there. Remember this is just so your blog can send you information ~ no one sees this address.

Membership and New User Default Role:

Leave them as they are. no changes.

Timezone:

I personally like to have my blog in my time zone ~ so I change this. Central time is -6, so you can figure out yours from there.

The rest:

Leave them as is, no changes necessary.

Click save changes. Remember you are going to get logged out, and will have to log back in because we changed the address.

Let’s move on to the next set of settings. Which is going to be …

Writing:

There’s nothing you have to do here. If you want at some point to be able to publish from your email this is where you find those settings ~ I have never done it so I don’t know how to set it up.

Reading:

Again there’s nothing you need to do here, the default settings will work just fine.  Note this is where you can change the number of posts that show up on the homepage of your blog. If you are monetizing with adsense (mainly) you may want to change that to 1 post on the front page. If affiliate marketing is your primary monetization method the default settings are fine.

Discussion:

Take a look through here, the default settings are usually fine. This section is where you can set how and what you are notified for, like comments, etc. You can also set your settings for spam here as well. I have only ever had to use this area once in all of my blogging, and I was getting a ton of spam from a specific IP address ~ I came in here and put their IP address on the blacklist and that solved the problems. You are not likely to have to use this because we will be using a plugin that works very well to manage spam.

Media Settings:

Again ~ default is fine here too.  You don’t have to mess with this at all.

Privacy settings:

This one is BIG. You don’t usually need to change anything, but you MUST check this setting. Sometimes ~ and it happened to me on this blog it will have your privacy settings marked so Google can’t see your site. You do NOT want that. You WANT google to see you. So if that happens just click the other option and save.

This is the one you WANT:

Permalinks:

This is a very important setting and one you need to change. Your permalinks are the url (address) your blog will use for your posts. It will be the permanent link to each post on your blog. This is where we begin our on page seo efforts.

When you start a blog, the way the settings are set up when you post a blog post you will get your domainname.com/2345  or some sort of number for your post url. You don’t want that at all. You are going to be using your keywords in your blog posts and you want your url to reflect that ~ you want google to be able to see your keywords in your post urls (because we know that’s one of the most important things you can do to get Google love).

We are going to change the permalink structure so our postnames will be showing as part of our url. It’s not hard don’t worry.

You are going to choose custom structure ~ just click the little circle.

Then in the box after it you are going to add /%postname%.html

It will look like this when you’re done.

Click save changes and you’ll be good to go. If you are working on an old blog you want to be careful when changing your permalink structure. Some funky things can happen if you have a bunch of posts already done ~ and if you have any links out to specific posts they will not work anymore if you change the permalink structure ~ because the url you’ve sent the links to will no longer exist.

That’s it for the settings ~ there’s nothing that needs done in the misc area.

Now comes one of my favorite parts of setting up a new site.

THE THEME

One of  the things I love about wordpress is there are probably literally a billion different themes to choose from. Yes, it can be overwhelming when you think about it but here are a few hints to help you find the perfect theme for your site.

1. Ask google for exactly what you want. If you are looking for a blue free wordpress theme ~ ask google. If you are looking for a three column bike theme ~ then ask for that ~ it’s smart to add free wordrpess theme in your search query because there are plenty of themes you have to pay for ~ but DON’T it is totally uneccessary. There are more than enough free themes.

2. Think about your niche ~ try to match the theme you choose with your niche. If you’re doing a niche on doll clothes you dont’ want a theme that features black skulls and crossbones. As with anything in life, first impressions count. You want your theme to match up with your theme, and your content.

3. How many columns? I know someone’s gonna ask. It doesnt’ really matter how many columns ~ it’s really a matter of personal preference. I personally like 3 columns because it gives me room for navigation as well as some ad space.

4. Sidebars ~ it’s best if you can find a theme with the sidebar(s) on the right hand side. The way google reads a page it starts from the left and scans across the page ~ you want your content to be the first thing google sees on your site ~ not a sidebar of navigational links. So if you can, grab a theme with right side sidebars.

5. Less is almost always more. When you are choosing a theme remember ~ you want your content and your ads to be what draws the eye of the reader ~ not the flashing lights and sirens of your theme. Make sure you pick something that is easy to read ~ I HATE black background themes, I get such a headache trying to read white text, and then when I leave I have lights in my eyes ~ I will not even read a site that has white text on a black background ~ something to keep in mind. You want to make the experience of coming to your site to be pleasurable for the reader ~ and the look of your theme greatly contributes to this.

Google is a great place to look for themes, but it can be overwhelming because you will land on sites that literally have hundreds of pages of themes ~ you’ll just need to look through them until you find one you like. You can also use the site’s navigation to get you closer to what you’re looking for.

This can be a tedious process to some ~ but I love it.  I am still amazed at what people can do with a wordpress theme, and how a platform can suddenly look so completely different depending on the theme someone chooses for their site.

Here are some of my favorite places to find themes:

Rock Kitty These themes are really unique and she has a lot of pretty niche stuff here. I can almost always find something cool for my niche sites here.

Free theme forum This is actually a forum ~ but it is filled with tons and tons of pages of pretty good themes. I’ve found quite a few good ones here over the years.

When you are looking at themes you will usually be given the option to look at it on a demo page. This is fun because it gives you a full page to see what the theme will really look like (be forwarned sometimes the demo page will not work).

Once you ‘ve checked out the demo page and you think you’ve found the theme for you, you will want to download the theme. They come in a zip folder ~ all you need to do is click the download button and then choose where you want to save it on your computer.

Quick tip:

Set up a “wordpress” folder on your computer somewhere where you can find it. This will be where you keep all your wordpress related downloads. Then in main wordpress folder create another folder for themes. Make sure you save all your themes in that folder. It makes them SO much easier to find and for you to see what all you’ve already got.

Today’s action steps:
Change your settings.
Find a theme for your site and download it to your computer