Configuring WordPress
The first thing I did after installing WordPress and viewing my default blog page was to poke around in the WordPress configuration options to see if there was anything I wanted to change. To do anything with WordPress, you go to the URL http://[your domain name]/wp-admin. You will be prompted for the username and password that you set up during the WordPress installation.
When the browser loads the page, you will see a navigation menu on the left hand side. The top section is what you use to generate and manage your content – Posts, Media, Links, Pages, and Comments. The lower section has all of the configuration options.
WordPress Navigation Menu
Appearance is where you pick a theme and configure your widgets (I’ll cover this stuff in my next post). Plugins is where you can add custom functionality (I haven’t added anything yet). Users is where you manage users in case you want to have multiple people contributing to your blog. Tools has more custom functionality that you can add (I haven’t touched this either). Then there is Settings, where the bulk of your WordPress configuration is done.
The settings are all fairly self-explanatory and you’ll want to go through each one and configure it to your preference. Personally, I didn’t touch many of the settings initially since I figured that the default behavior was probably good enough until I learned how things worked. One thing that I would definitely recommend changing immediately is the Permalink settings. You want to choose a link format that includes the post name because it makes your site much more SEO friendly. I chose “Month and name” because I figured the odds of me having two posts with the same name in the same month were extremely slim.
