Tutorial 5 – WordPress Themes, Permalinks and User Settings

Now that you’ve got your new WordPress blog installed there are a couple of house keeping issues I suggest you take care of right away.

These items will contribute to the functionality of your blog, as well as your visitors and readers experience.

#1 Permalinks

When you install WordPress out of the box the URLs of blog posts (what you see in that white bar in your Internet browser at the top) are not very “clean”. That is to say they have a bunch of what looks like random characters in them, which aren’t very easy to share with people.

Our goal in changing our permalinks is to make our URL’s appear more cleanly in the URL bar.

Example: Original URL without changing Permalinks might look something like YourDomain.com/?p=1245

After we change our Permalinks your URL’s will look something like YourDomain.com/your-new-post-title

So how do we change this?

Step 1: Login to your WordPress admin panel.

Step 2: On the right hand side bar hover your mouse over settings, this will cause a sub navigation menu to appear, click on the Permalinks link on that menu.

Step 3: Select the permalinks format you want. I’m going to suggest (and you’ll see in the video below) that you choose either the Month and name or just Post name option.

Step 4: Click the Save Changes button at the bottom and thats it.

#2 Modifying your Admin User

When you first install wordpress through the 1-click install feature at Host Gator it randomly creates a username and password for you to use. The username is always admin, but the password is often a very long convaluded string of letters and numbers.

I suggest that users change their password to something they’ll remember after installing wordpress.

The other thing we’re going to change is the display name that appears to our readers when they see who posted the content on our new blog.

So how do we change the admin user settings?

Step 1: On the left hand side bar click Users, then select your profile.

Step 2: Enter your first and last name in the fields that are available and then for Display Name select what you’d prefer (either your first name, or first and last name etc.).

Step 3: At the bottom of this page there’s an area for New password. Enter a password you’ll easily remember, but is hard enough not to be easily cracked. Enter it twice as required, make a note of it somewhere save and click the Update Profile button.

#3 WordPress Themes

Themes are what really allows you to personalize your new blog. There are tons of free wordpress themes out there to use as well as paid and premium themes. For this purpose we’re going to assume you just want to use a regular free theme. Later on we’ll be creating some tutorials and reviews of the different paid and premium themes available.

Since there’s quite a bit to selecting a theme I’m going to suggest you now direct your attention to the tutorial video below. I walk you through the entire process of searching the available themes, choosing one and then installing it.

Previous Tutorials

• Tutorial 1 – Register Domain with GoDaddy.com
• Tutorial 2 – Setup Web Hosting with HostGator.com
• Tutorial 3 – Changing Name Servers at Godaddy.com
• Tutorial 4 – Installing WordPress