Base configuration

Before you can start blogging, you have to change a few of the settings of your blog. Upon creating some default values are entered into your blog you must likely never want to have : The ‘Blog description’, the first post and the first page. Also you most likely would want to change the theme used for your blog : let’s be fair : De default theme is outdated and ugly.

After logging in into your blog you are taken to the ‘Dashboard’. On top of the dashboard you might see some -according to the admin- important news, but for the moment we won’t concentrate on the news, but on the menu on the left site of your screen. When you hoover over ‘main menu’ you will see a small arrow downward, when you click it, the menu will be opened, without selecting anything, when you click the menu text itself, the menu will open de ‘default page’ for that menu section.

First we want to change the Blog description, we go to ‘Setting’ and when we click it we’ll get a menu with the general settings. The first two items in that menu are ‘Blog Title’ and ‘Tagline’. Change the default tagline in some useful text or make it empty. Take good care a tagline should be descriptive and a bit of a ‘teaser’, because when showing the results of a search engine, the tagline might be one of the first things a user reeds. Besides : It is also the description of your RSS Feed, more over that, later.

Next you want to change the default page. Click on ‘Pages’ (the header of the ‘Pages’ menu) and a list with pages, now only the ‘About’ page, will appear. Delete it or change the text in something you want users to read.

Another ‘information item’ we do not want is the default posts. Again, this time to Posts, we click the menu item and do more or less the same as we did with the items.

Next we’ll do is to choose some nice theme. Feel free to play around a bit : Click on Appearance, then ‘Themes’ and you get a page with several themes available. Simply click on ‘Activate’ to try one out. Take good care of the combination of size of the pictures and the ‘active’ area for your post. If your picture are wider then the width of the page, different browsers will show different results, but all are ugly.

Now you have taken care of the most basic settings for your blog and you’re ready to write your fist post.