Learning Objectives
Level: beginners
Target: anyone using WordPress as the CMS for their websites
In this How to Create A Website: Configuring WordPress After Installation tutorial, you will learn how all the essential steps to go through after the WordPress website software has been installed on your web hosting account with the 1-click WordPress installation wizard.
If you have not yet registered for your own website domain and subscribed to a web hosting plan, you are advised to take a look at the How to Create A Website Guide first.
Tricks of Every WordPress Professional Developers
Upon successful installation of the WordPress, you will be able to see immediately a website at your own domain. However, this website contains a lot of irrelevant or useless materials and is not tuned. Every WordPress professional developer will do the following steps to make the website look “pro” in no time. There are 4 simple steps to take to make right the 4 issues as indicated in the following screen capture:
- Change the default Site Title and Tagline
- Remove the placeholder Post and Comment
- Remove the placeholder Page
- Make the URL address readable
- click “log in” at the lower left part of the web page; OR
- add “/wp-admin” to the URL of your website homepage address, e.g. for the website at “http://wplearner.org” the admin area address is “http://wplearner.org/wp-admin”
1. Set the Site Title as well as the Tagline
On the menu bar on the left, hover over “Settings” and click “General“. The first two fields are the “Site Title” and the “Tagline”.
The Site Title is the name you give to the site which can be anything like “My Personal Blog”, “Small Business Website”, “Code Playground”, etc. This name will usually be appended to the title of every page of your website, so it is advised that this Site Title is short and easy to remember.
The Tagline is a sentence or two to describe what exactly your website is about to first time visitors. For the WP Learner website, the tagline is “Learn Creating Website and Blog Fast”, other suggestions are “How to Create A Website”, “All about crafts”, “My online notebook”, etc.
Changes made to these two fields will be immediately reflected on your website.
On the same page, you may also like to make changes to the following fields according to your preferences:
- Email Address – this address will not be published but will be used by WordPress to send you notifications about your website
- Timezone, Date Format, Time Format, Week Starts On – these will affect how the time and date will be displayed in posts and calendars
- Membership – uncheck it for the time being as it is not advisable to use the default membership function of WordPress as it is not quite mature, if you need to create a members only section, you are advised to install some proven membership plugins which will help you a lot
2. Delete the Placeholder Post and Comment
By default, newly installed WordPress would have a placeholder post title “HELLO WORLD!” as well as a comment to that post by “Mr. WordPress”. These are meant to be deleted but somehow many websites still have these items after a long time!
You can delete these two placeholder items in one simple step. On the menu bar on the left, hover over “Posts” and click “All Posts“. Then hover over the post title “Hello World!” and click “Trash“. This post together with the comment about it will be deleted (moved to the trash, to be precise).
3. Delete the Placeholder Page
In WordPress, “Posts” and “Pages” are very similar. Posts are usually used for contents that would be outdated in future (e.g. latest event, news, offer, etc.) while pages are used for ever-green contents (e.g. contact methods, about us, etc.) . In addition to deleting the post and comment in step 2, we need also to delete the placeholder page here.
On the menu bar on the left, hover over “Pages” and click “All Pages“. Then hover over the page title “Sample Page” and click “Trash“. The sample page will be moved to trash. The link to the “SAMPLE PAGE” on the homepage of the website will also be removed automatically.
4. Configure the URL for Readability and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The default setting for the URL addresses of pages and posts of the website would look quite strange with the “?” and a random combination of numbers and alphabets. This will make the link not friendly to read and remember. It is recommended that the URL addresses would best to include readable words or phrases. You can easily configure the URL is such way in WordPress.
On the menu bar on the left, hover over “Settings” and click “Permalinks“. Click “Post name” under “Common Settings”. This would have the added benefit of better search engine rankings as the URLs are optimized for search engines. More about SEO can be found here.
Similarly, a better URL structure can be configured for all the materials you would upload to the website. On the menu bar on the left, click “Media” under “Settings” . Uncheck the option “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders” under “Uploading Files”. The option is only useful if you have tons of graphics and attachments uploaded every day. But for normal websites, there is no need to organize the files in individual folders based on the month and year.
The Next Step
Now that you have a clean copy of WordPress as your website, you can add functionality to it with plugins and tailor the design to your desire using themes.
Conclusion – How to Create A Website In A Professional Way
After learning these tricks of every WordPress professional developers on how to best optimize WordPress powered websites, you have all the knowledge to distinguish between a website built by WordPress professionals (like you) and the average website owners. You will also be able to give your website a head start to rank well in search engines.
With these Advanced Guides on How to Create A Website, you too can create your own website in no time without any prerequisite skills!
Edward Chung
Latest posts by Edward Chung (see all)
