Here we are at part two, mostly easy stuff deleting and modifying a few default options… Login to your WordPress admin at yourdomain.com/wp-admin and select these from the left hand menu.
* Posts
- Edit..
..Tick ‘Hello world’, Delete, Apply
- Categories
..Change ‘uncategorized’ to main theme Category
..Add any other main categories and subcategories
* Links
- Edit
..Click box next to name to select all
..Select Delete from actions and Apply
- Link Categories
..Change ‘blogroll’ to ‘Useful Links’ or similar
* Users
- Your Profile
..Fill in any details, name and website etc.
..and Click Update Profile
* Settings
- General
..Set Title, Subtitle, Timezone, Save Changes
- Permalinks (*VERY IMPORTANT SEO STEP!*)
..Select Custom Structure, then input:
/%category%/%postname%/
..Update Settings
- Discussion
..Modify to suit your own purposes
- Reading
..Change Blog pages to your desired display.
..Increase Syndication Feeds to show 20-30.
* Spend some time choosing a theme at:
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/
* Appearance
- Themes
..Click on Add New Themes and search
..Activate a Theme and View your site
..Keep going until you like the look of your site!
You can always change the header and/or background later,
but try to get the general look of the site how you want.
* Appearance
- Widgets
Add your menu widgets as you’d like to have them.
Simply drag the desired widgets ontto the sidebar.
Here’s the rough selection and order that I go for:
..RSS Feed
..Search
..Categories
..Recent Posts
..Recent Comments
..Archives
..Tag Cloud
..Links
..Edit your widget options to enter titles etc.
- Options
Some themes will have additional options you can set.
- Editor
If you have any CSS knowledge you might want to make some tweaks to your theme’s stylesheets.
** This is the hard part folks, it’s time-consuming but worth it to make your site look the way you want it to. **
It takes a bit of experimenting to get things in the right place if you make changes. You can always play with this later if you’re unsure about it, more important for now is to move on and get your third-party plugins and content up and running.
What next? Read part three of the blog setup guide: WordPress Pinglist
PS. If you would like to find out how to create and promote a successful blog then I highly recommend you check out BlogSuccess.Com