WordPress Settings

WordPress Admin: Learn about WordPress settings – how and why you would use them.

There are a number of administration settings in a WordPress site including changing your site title, writing and reading settings, permalinks, media and more. Many of these you will never have to change or worry about if Artbiz installed WordPress for you. The following lists all the available WordPress settings pages and explains what the each one does.

General Settings

WordPress General settings is where you can change the name of your site and tagline that appear in the header.
– Update your email address; this is the email that WordPress uses to send notifications for things like new comments on your blog or where your new password will be sent should you forget yours.
– Don’t be tempted to change the WordPress Address or Site Address URL’s or WordPress won’t be able to find itself and neither will you or anyone else.
– Set time zone, date and time formats for how you want theme to appear in the meta data of your blog.
– Selecting the day your week starts changes the layout of the calendar widget.

Writing Settings

In the WordPress Writing settings set the various options surrounding how you write posts. It also allows you to set the size (number of lines) of the text box in the Post editor, as well as the default category used for newly created links and posts.
You can also create a secret email address to which you can send new entries for your site – this can be good if you need to update the site from difficult locations or via a smart phone.

Reading Settings

Your Home Page can be any page that exists on your WordPress site. For example if you have a important event that you want to publicize you can set that page to be the landing page of your site. When the event is over change the “Home” page to your Artwork, Bio or anything other page you have.

So the “Home Page” doesn’t have to be an actual page called Home or Welcome with content developed specifically for it. It can be any page or even your blog if you have one.

To set the “Landing Page” a.k.a. Home Page go to Settings in the WordPress admin and under the Reading tab select the page you want from the drop down menu.

If your site is set to use a static page as the front page and you are also using the blog, you will need an empty page (named what ever you like) to be the landing page for your blog. Select that page from the drop down list of pages.

NOTE: the blog landing page must be with out content. Anything you type on this page will not show up on your live site. WordPress uses this page to dynamically display your posts when using a static page as the front (home/landing) page.

Discussion Settings

Under the WordPress Discussion settings you will set options relating to how people can make comments, for example whether the comments need authorising before showing on the site (advisable to prevent comment spam), the default comment settings for articles, and so on. There are quite a number of items here. To read more about each please refer to WordPress Codex at this link https://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_Discussion_Screen

Media Settings

WordPress Media settings allow you to choose the maximum sizes for images inserted into your written content; you can also insert an image as full size as well as adding pixel sizes for a medium image.

The Embed option allows you embed a video, image, or other media into your content automatically by typing the URL (of the web page where the file lives) on its own line when you create your content. If you do not set the maximum embed size, it will be automatically sized to fit into your content area.

Uploading Files allows you to choose the folder and path for storing your uploaded files. The default path is organized into month and year folders ‘wp-content/uploads’ folder on the server.

You must click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen for new settings to take effect.

Privacy Settings

You can choose whether or not your site will be crawled by robots, ping services, and spiders in WordPress Privacy . If you want those services to ignore your site, click the radio button next to “Ask search engines not to index this site” and click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen. However, hiding from Google doesn’t mean every search engine will skip you – some aren’t very good at using these settings and still go ahead – the result is that you can still be indexed – so your content isn’t never 100% private.
When this setting is in effect a reminder is shown in the Right Now box of the Dashboard that says, “Search Engines Blocked,” to remind you that your site is not being crawled.

Permalinks Settings

WordPress Permalinks are a way of structuring your website so that the address to an article makes some sense to humans and search engines. Because of the programming language that WordPress uses the default URL format for how your pages and posts display in the browser address bar is www.website.com/?p=101

If we use a custom structure we can get our pages and posts to appear like…
For posts the URL would look like:www.website.com/name-of-category/name-of-post/

For pages the URL would look like:www.website.com/name-of-parent/name-of-page/

If there isn’t a parent page then it would look like:www.website.com/name-of-page/

To do this we need to set the custom structure to /%category%/%postname%/

Optional
You can change the slug for your categories and tags and how the URL will appear for your blog archives.

The defaults are:

For Categories: www.website.com/category/name-of-category
Enter the word topics to replace category and the URL will appear as: www.website.com/topics/name-of-category

For Tags: www.website.com/tag/name-of-tag
You can choose another name for tag

So ends the WordPress Admin section, now let’s pretty up your site by changing the Appearance Options