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Once you have WordPress installed there are a few things to do to set it up and have it looking how you want before you get going. It is also a very good idea to go through some of the WordPress guides as you get started. Most stuff you do will be reflected in existing posts if you do it after you have written your first couple of things too.

There are a few things that will get you set up and making your site a bit more personalised:

• Change the URL to your top level domain
• Check the user posts as nickname
• Set your Permalink Structure
• General Settings
• Choose Your Theme

Change the URL to your top level domain

The first thing to do is to change the URL to your top domain. When we installed WordPress we installed it into its own folder. That is a good idea, but we need to move the home of your blog back to the main domain you set up for this. It is pretty easily done.

1. Log in to your WordPress admin and click on settings (on the left hand menu). This will bring up your General Settings.
2. Change your blog address to your top level domain (remove the /wordpress). DOo not change your WordPress address (that is pointing to your WordPress files)
3. Click update options
4. Log into your control panel on your web host
5. Go to the file manager
6. Find the index.php and .htaccesss files in your WordPress folder and copy them into your root directory (so they are at the same level as your WordPress folder, as well as in it- this is in public_html in my setup)
7. Open the index.php file that is in the root directory in a text editor (in my webhost I can select the file and click on code editor) and change the line that says “require(‘./wp-blog-header.php’)” to “require(‘./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php’)” (i.e. tell it where your WordPress files are). Save your changes
8. Go to the web address and check that your blog is appearing there.

Check the user posts as nickname

When we installed WordPress we created a nickname for Admin to display as. I did this after I installed so it is a good idea to make sure this is set up OK.

1. Log in to your WordPress admin panel
2. Click on Users, then the user
3. Check that the Display name publicly as is set to what you want
4. If it isn’t, select the nickname from the dropdown and click update profile

Set your Permalink Structure

Permalinks set the web address for your post. Your most recent posts are shown on your main page, but the permalink will always link to that post. You can structure it using dates, a counter, or plenty of other formats.

From your WordPress Control Panel go to Settings then permalinks. There are some optional settings or you can set your own tag structure using the WordPress Permalink Tags

General Settings

Have a look at the other General settings while you are setting things up. You can set your Time zone, Date Format, Time Format etc. They are all small things, but if you don’t do it now you probably never will, and things like setting your time zone might save you some confusion as you are getting used to how everything works.

Choose Your Theme

This is the big step to making the blog your own (if maybe not completely unique). Until now your blog has had the default blue WordPress ‘Kubrick’ theme. There are plenty of themes out there. It is just a matter of finding what you want, downloading it, uploading it and selecting it.

1. There are themes all over the place. Have a google obviously, and look at WordPress’s themes
2. When you have found a theme download the files to your computer. They will usually be contained in a zip file. Save them to a location you can access them, because you are about to post them to your webhost.
3. Upload the files using an ftp client. I use the FireFTP Firefox plugin and Filezilla is a popular free one. You will upload the unzipped theme folder to your WordPress/wp-content/themes folder.
4. Select your theme in WordPress. Log into your WordPress dashboard and select Appearance, then themes. The themes you have available will be listed. Click on one and it will be previewed, showing your content. If you like it, click on Activate in the top right corner.

Have a look around

It is a good idea to do a bit of exploration. Have a look at the different options in the dashboard, there are explanations on the WordPress site. Also look around the documentation at WordPress. Everything you’ll want to do is there.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Blogging, Getting Started. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.