WordPress® 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 5. Basic Admin Settings

WordPress has dozens of administrative settings at your disposal, but you'll probably use most of the default settings for as long as you run your site. So the good news is you don't need to mess with more than a few settings as you begin to build your site.

This lesson is to familiarize you with the Settings menu and to show you how to change those truly important few settings. I deal with other admin settings as they're needed in other lessons.

Settings to Get You Started

The Settings heading on the admin menu is where you control various site-wide parameters for WordPress, and its submenus are divided by functions:

• General

• Writing

• Reading

• Discussion

• Media

• Privacy

• Permalinks

• Miscellaneous

This is the menu when you first install WordPress. If you add plugins (those extra pieces of software that enable WordPress to do even more) this Settings menu may show more choices depending on the plugins.

The first of the crucial settings to be changed are under Settings

Figure 5-1. Figure 5-1

Tagline

The tagline is the text just below the title of your site displayed in the header. This is meant to be a more descriptive phrase about your site and in the case of the Island Travel sample site, Figure 5-2 shows the new tagline as it appears on the site after saving the changes. ...