Setting up a WordPress site

Default

Your crisp new website will not be blank; a new WordPress install comes with a placeholder home page and blog post including placeholder text and images. There is even a default comment.

It is preloaded with the default WordPress theme (which is Twenty Twenty-Four at the time of writing this).

It is worth having content ready to update the site immediately:

• title
• logo
• contact details (minimum of an email address)

Pages vs Posts

WordPress was designed for blogging; a blog is a chronological series of posts. When you landed on a blog you expected to see a list of blog post titles and summaries that you could click through to and read. The posts were categorised by date as well as other metadata that could be added (categories and later tags).

You are also able to create standalone pages with menus as would be expected of a standard website. A combination of both can be most effective in meeting all your requirements.

Themes

Themes can be installed, activated, and modified within WordPress at the click of a button. While correctly developed themes are designed to be interchangeable, some differences exist as many themes add custom features that are unavailable in others.

There are hundreds if not thousands of free themes and as many premium ones.

Settings

Reading

Set your homepage. This can be a static page, or it could be your blog. Set your Posts page — this will invariably be your blog. You may well choose to start with one and not the other, for example, you may want to set up a few static pages with a menu and only start blogging later.

1. Scroll down to Settings in the Admin panel
2. Select the Reading tab
3. Select what you want your homepage to display
4. Drop down populated with pages that have been published
5. Select your blog homepage
6. Your blog posts will appear on a series of pages
7. Select how many posts should appear in the feed (see an example of a feed here: https://www.stylus.co.za/feed/
8. Select how you want posts to appear in your feed
9. I cannot imagine why you would want to activate this setting
10. Don’t forget to save your changes

Discussion

This is where you configure who can comment and how.

Because WordPress sites are so common they are an easy target for the endless spambots scanning for comment, subscription, sign-up & contact forms. See the Akismet Anti-spam plugin below.

Permalinks

I use the Post name option, https://www.stylus.co.za/sample-post/, which is arguably the most SEO‑friendly.

Changing this setting after you have published posts is not a good idea.

Users

You are naturally already a user (most likely the user created when WordPress was installed). If you did not perform your installation and create your password, I recommend changing your password immediately.

Users with different roles can be created: Subscriber, Contributor, Author, Editor, Administrator. Users can edit and update their profiles.

There is much functionality to support this multi-user setup. An example is WordPress’ ability to manage multiple users working simultaneously:

Plugins

Much of what you will do relies on plugins. There are hundreds of free plugins as well as premium versions. Below are some of the plugins I use:

Akismet Anti-spam

One of the plugins included in the WordPress installations is the Akismet Anti-spam plugin. This plugin handles most spam comments (if you enable commenting) effectively.

Updraft plus

I have learned from experience NOT to rely on your hosting company to back your site up.

I use UpdraftPlus to schedule backups of both the database and the actual website files and assets which are then automatically uploaded to my Google Drive.

TablePress

I use the TablePress plugin for any significant amount of tabulated data. View an example here: https://www.stylus.co.za/icons-logos-you-should-recognise/

Font Awesome

I use the free version of Font Awesome for most of the icons I use on this site.

See the Getting started with the awesome Font Awesome tutorial.