Settings You Should Know

The last major section of your dashboard is Settings. When you click on this in the left column, bottom, it expands to list Writing, Reading, Discussion, Media, Privacy, Permalinks and Miscellaneous. I will cover the more important part of most of these below.

Most of the general settings should have been already setup for you or have logical defaults. However, the first two items appear as the title to your blog (Blog Title) and its Tagline. You may want to change these.

If you edit or change any settings (here or elsewhere) remember to save the changes. The Save Changes button is at the bottom - so scroll down and click or your changes will be forgotten.

Do not change the URL settings! These settings should only be changed if your site is not working. If your site isn't working you probably can't see this page anyway. But you can break your site if you change these settings when it is working.

The Membership and New User Default Role define whether visitors can register for your blog and if so, what permissions they receive by default.

The remaining General Settings concern time and date options.

Read through the Discussion Settings and see if these are what you want. Among the options that are set here are who is allowed to post comments to your post and whether you must approve the comment before it appears on your site.

The Media Settings options all have to do with the sizes of images that are inserted into a post. You can customize the sizes as you like.

There are only two options for Privacy Settings. Either you want the world, including search engines, to be able to find your blog on the web - OR - you want to block search engines from indexing your site. Although it is tempting to presume that everyone wants the first option, you may be writing for a private audience and only wish to share your thoughts with those you have invited to your site.

Permalinks are permanent URL links to each post you publish for your blog. Having a permanent URL address allows other people to be able to link to your articles.

You can find out a lot more about Permalinks by clicking on the ”A number of tags are available” link on the Permalink Settings page which links to the WordPress documentation on Using Permalinks.

The default option is often described as the “ugly” option. The other options are different ways of organizing your posts - e.g., by /year/month/day/title. A trend among some WordPress users is to customize this so the URL isn't as long. Maybe just use /year/title.