Continuing my series on WordPress for Beginners, Lesson 3 is going to focus on setting up your options. There are a number of options that need to be set up before you really beginning blogging. I’ll deal with three that you need to change and explain what they are, why you should care about them, and how to set them. Other bloggers may have different tips for you, but I think these steps should help get you started!

So to modify your options in WordPress, you need to do into Admin as before. Login and you will see the dashboard, now look along the row of commands until you see the words “Options”. Click and you’re there.

You’ll now see the commands listed below: General, Writing, Reading, Discussion, Privacy, Permalinks and Miscellaneous… You can click through the other commands later. But first, let’s get set up.

Setting Your Blog Title, Tagline, and Membership

Blog Title: When you were setting up your blog, perhaps you chose your title carefully, perhaps you didn’t. Either way, you may wish to change that. To do that, we’re going to open the ‘General’ tab on the top left. See it! Right under Dashboard in white. Clicking on this will take you to the following page.

Tagline: You can simply change the title of your blog in ‘Weblog title’ and hit return. So try that! Most people don’t know how to change the Tagline (the Tagline is the line of text that sits under your Weblog Title usually), but this is where you can change it.

Membership: I don’t recommend beginners screwing with the next two options WordPress address or Blog address. So LEAVE them alone, unless you KNOW you have to change those.

Just below your E-mail address is a ‘Membership’ options. On this blog, I’ve allowed anyone to register to leave comments, and Users must be logged in to leave comments. You can of course change both of these. If you don’t want anyone else to register, then unclick ‘Anyone can register’. If you don’t want unregistered people to comment, then check the next one as I have. I’ll post later about commenting, if you’re still confused.

Don’t change the Default Role for new users. Subscriber is the lowest level role, and the safest.

Next in Lesson #4, we’re going to be looking at ‘updating service’… See you in a few days.

If you’re too busy, why don’t you sign up for my feed via RSS or Email, so you don’t have to keep checking the blog for the next part!