Devin Reams over at DevinReams.com has written a ‘theme song’ for WordPress. Check it out - it’s very cool!

When I switched themes to this In Business theme I forgot something - my newsletter subscription box. It’s back now so please sign up for the WordPress Guru Newsletter! Just look to the right and down a bit - it’s right there in the sidebar.

This is a good lesson in itself. When you change themes, not everything translates so it’s a good idea to make a checklist of everything on your old blog so you don’t forget to put it on your new blog. I talked about how the posts themselves aren’t a problem but everything in the sidebar needs to be checked.

Do you have your categories squared away? Good - because now we are going to dive into WordPress options.

Log-in to your admin panel and look across the choices until you find ‘Options’. Click on Options and you will be preesnted with a new screen of choices. If your WordPress installation is new, you will have 6 options - General, Writing, Reading, Discussion, Permalinks and Miscellaneous. We will look at each one in depth so don’t be intimidated.

Let’s take a closer look at General Options. Many of the blanks will be filled in for you but look at them anyway because generally the e-mail field is wrong. The Title field should contain what you want your blog to be called. Mine is ‘WordPressGuru.com. Next is the Tagline. This is simply a short description of what your blog is all about. Think about this before you fill in this blank and make it keyword rich.  Of course, you can change any option at any time so nothing you choose at this point will be carved in stone.
The next two fields are URI’s. These will probably be the same unless you have WordPress installed in one directory and your blog installed in another.
Look closely at the e-mail address because it’s probably wrong. This address will not be displayed anywhere. It is for WordPress to communicate with you so just make it your primary address.

Now comes Membership. This is up to you but I like to leave these two fields unchecked because I moderate all comments (coming in another option). If your comments get out of hand (hopefully!) you can change this option later. I like for it to be easy for my readers to leave a comment so I have these unchecked on all of my blogs except 1. That blog gets so much traffic and so many comments that I want people to register and login. Generally people who want to leave stupid comments won’t bother to register. I am NOT talking about spam comments. That’s a whole other subject which we will talk about later.

New user default role should be Subscriber. Look at the choices you have here. You certainly don’t want your readers to have change access to your blog so you don’t want anyone else to be an administrator unless you co-author a blog. If you get to the point where you have people contributing to your blog you might want to give those people author status but that’s about it. Let new readers who might register keep their subscriber status.

Tomorrow we will talk about date and time and all the different formats you can choose.

When you install WordPress there will be one category. Its name is ‘Uncategorized’ and unless you change it, every post will go into that category by default.

First, let’s get rid of that word-with-no-meaning, ‘Uncategorized’. Login to your Administration Panel and click on Manage and then click on Categories. Click on the ‘Edit’ field beside the category name. Enter a new category name and ’slug’. Give this category name some thought because it will become the default. That is, if you forget to check a category, this category will be used automatically. We’ll add new categories shortly, but this is the one to think about for now.

Enter the category name and ’slug’, if you want one. The slug is the link title of your your category and is separate from the name of your category. For example, if your Category is named General and the slug is named Miscellaneous, your General category will be located at yourdomain.com/wordpress/archives/category/general/. Click on ‘Edit Category’ to save your changes.

Adding new categories is easier. Simply look on the right side of your screen while you are in Write from the Admin Panel. You will see the word Categories with a + or - next to it. If it shows a +, click on the + sign to expand the item. You will see a box with the clickable word ‘Add’ next to it. Add as many categories as you want but make them meaningful to the subject of your blog. You can change or delete categories in the Manage, Categories window.

Categories are cool because they help your reader find posts on a certain subject without wading through the whole blog to find them. If your reader wants to see every post related to one subject, he can simply click on that category in your sidebar and see all posts filed under that category.

You can create a subset of categories under a larger category and we’ll talk about that next. Until then - start creating your categories!