This is the fifth step in a series of posts – a guide that I’m writing that will help walk you through setting up your own website, on your own domain name, using WordPress as a content management system.

Now that you’ve completed the previous step and installed the basic WordPress installation onto your own server space by using Fantastico, you now should have something that looks like this up on your domain name when you type it into your browser:

Your new web page will not come up if you search for it using Google or Yahoo at the moment. This is good, because it is inconsiderately ugly. We will change that shortly, but right now we’re going to change the default settings that new WordPress installs always start out with. Because they’re defaults.

To change anything on your website, you need to log into the administration area of the site. You can do this from any browser, anywhere in the world. Simply go to “http://yourwebsite.com/wp-admin” and this is where you’re taken to:

Type in your administrator login name and the appropriate password (you do have that written down, don’t you?) and you’re taken to this screen:

What you have here is the WordPress dashboard screen. You will be seeing a lot of this.

There is a good amount of information on the WordPress dashboard. You can, if you click on the screen options tab on the very top of the screen under “Howdy, Your Name,” change what you see on the dashboard.

I usually remove the QuickPress section, along with the Recent Drafts, WordPress Development Blog, Other WordPress News and Plugins sections. You can do the same, or leave them all up. You can, if you have a wide enough screen, make your dashboard have 3 or 4 columns and spread everything out however you like. It’s quite flexible.

Once you have set your dashboard up the way you like, it’s time to go to the WordPress settings tab down here to the left:

As you get more familiar with WordPress, you will undoubtedly begin to be more comfortable with the various settings and features within WordPress. Because this is your first website, however, I will give you a quick rundown of the settings you should change and the settings you should not change.

The first section of the Settings tab is the General settings section. Here you can change things like the title of the site, the tagline, the administrator e-mail and the date and time display formats. Right now we’re just going to change the time zone to whatever you feel is most appropriate. Since both I and Allen Selby are in Omaha, I’ll change the UTC time manually to -5 hours and click “Save Changes” on the bottom of the screen:

That done, go to the Writing tab under the settings and change the size of the post box to 15 or 20. This is strictly a personal preference. I like to see more of what I’m writing and 10 lines makes me feel like I’m writing with a visored helmet on. Save the changes and go down to the Reading Tab.

This is the point where you have to start making decisions about what you want this website to be.

If this is a website for a brick and mortar business, it might be a good idea to choose to show visitors to the site a static page that tells them about the business, the business location and the services that it offers. You’ll still be able to have users read the individual posts that you’ll be making, but every time they go to the site, they’ll see the static page that you select instead of seeing a list of the 10 latest posts you’ve made.

If this is going to be a less formal site, maybe a personal site or something along that line, you can leave this as it is. When people go to the site, they’ll see the latest post you’ve made at the top, followed by every other post underneath it in reverse chronological order. The newest posts will be at the top of the page with the oldest posts being pushed to the bottom.

There are really no hard and fast rules for making either choice. Plenty of businesses run their website as a business blog, telling customers about the latest company news, offers, coupons and so on. Other businesses update infrequently and are more interested in just maintaining a web presence.

So make your decision, save the change and go to the Discussion tab, where you will see this screen:

On this page, you’re going to want to make sure these settings are checkmarked:

• Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article
• Allow link notifications from other blogs
• Allow people to post comments on new articles
• Comment author must fill out name and e-mail
• Enable threaded (nested) comments

On your first website, you also want to be e-mailed whenever anyone posts a comment or a comment is held for moderation. You can always change that later if you start getting a lot of visitors and comments.

To the right of where it says Comment Moderation, change the 2 to a 1 in the box between Hold a comment in the queue if it contains and or more links. That will help filter out spam comments.

Everything else can wait for later. For now, go to the Privacy settings tab, where you will see this:

For right now, you should leave this alone, but you should be aware of what this is, because once you get your site set up the way you want it, and with some useful content, you’ll want to change this setting from the default. For right now, keep this set to: I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors.

Now go to the next tab down, the Permalinks tab, where you will see this:

Search engines like Google and Yahoo like web pages to be descriptive of what they’re about.

Say I have a page on AllenSelby.com about how much Allen loves tooth whitening services in Omaha. If I want that page to rank higher when people search for “Omaha tooth whitening services” in Google, then I should do everything I can to help Google identify what that page is about – Omaha tooth whitening services.

One of the factors that goes into how high a web page ranks for a search term is the permalink structure.

Right now, with the default permalink settings, if I had a page on this site about tooth whitening, it could have an url of, say, “http://allenselby.com/?p123″ – which is not very helpful to Google when it comes to telling what the page is about. As a result of the poor permalink structure, if all other factors were even, Google would probably rank me a bit lower than a site with better permalink structure.

But if I changed the permalink structure to, oh, “http://allenselby.com/omaha-tooth-whitening-services” – well that would tell Google right off the bat to start thinking about Omaha tooth whitening services while crawling this page.

So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to make your site have more descriptive titles for the pages you eventually write.

Click on the Month and Name radio button, like this:

When you do that, the code – /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ – comes up in the box to the right of Custom Structure. This is good, but we can do better. Delete everything in that box but – /%postname%/ and then click Save Changes. Make it look like this before you save the changes:

With that done, your blog is almost ready for you to put some content on it.

The next step is working with plugins. After that, I’ll show you how to change the look of your new site to something more interesting than the default theme.

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

Registering a Domain Name
Choosing a Web Hosting Company: Hawk Host or Liquid Web
Pointing Your Domain Name to Your Web Host
Using cPanel and Fantastico to Put Up Your First Website
Changing The Default WordPress Settings On Your First Website
Locating, Loading And Activating Useful WordPress Plugins For Your First Website
A List Of Useful WordPress Plugins

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