9 settings I always adjust as soon as I install a new WordPress blog

Hopefully the step-by-step guide on how to install self-hosted WordPress has helped you set your own blog. WordPress features many customization options and settings, even before you start installing the different plugins. In this article I will look at the 9 settings I adjust as soon as I install a new WordPress blog. Watch the video:

Setup blog title and tagline

(In Settings – General)

• You don’t want your blog to be branded as “just another WordPress weblog”
• Write your blog title and explain why your blog is unique in the blog tagline

Change permalinks

(In Settings – Permalinks)

• You don’t want your blog articles to be called something like:

http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=123

• You want to make your URL’s unique, keyword-rich, SEO and user friendly
• On HowToMakeMyBlog.com I use the custom option field like this:

/%category%/%postname%/

• By doing this my blog permalinks look like this:

http://www.howtomakemyblog.com/category/postname/

Change the admin nickname

(In Users – Your Profile)

• You don’t want “Admin” to be the name of the author of the blog posts you write
• Change admin nickname to your own name and have it displayed alongside each post

Clean up

• Delete Hello World! generic post (In Posts)
• Delete the generic About page (In Pages)
• Delete generic blogroll (In Links)
• Delete Hello Dolly plugin (In Plugins)

Activate comment spam filter

(In Plugins)

• Akismet is the best comment spam filter and it comes with your WordPress
• You just need to get the free WordPress API key to be able to activate it

No to email updates

(In Settings – Discussion – E-mail me whenever)

• As default WordPress notifies you via email when there is a new comment on your blog
• I prefer to use WordPress Notifier (Mac only – not sure what the Windows software is) to get updates on my desktop so I change the default option to no emails

Update ping services

(In Settings – Writing – Update Services)

• Pings help you promote your blog by automatically notifying different online services when you publish a new blog post
• I use the following update services on HowToMakeMyBlog:

http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b http://api.feedster.com/ping http://api.moreover.com/ping http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2 http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2 http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi http://coreblog.org/ping/ http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php http://ping.blo.gs/ http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc http://ping.feedburner.com http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2 http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/ http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping http://rpc.twingly.com http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2 http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2

Make it visible to search engines

(In Settings – Privacy)

• Make sure your blog is visible to everyone, including search engines

Get own blog theme

(In Appearance – Themes)

• You don’t want WordPress Default to be your blog theme
• Read why I use Thesis Theme on my blog
• Find the theme you like and download it
• Upload the theme onto your server (/wp-content/themes/)
• Activate

Image by TwoBlueDay