WordPress To Go - How To Build A WordPress Website On Your Own Domain, From Scratch, Even If You Are A Complete Beginner (2013)

QUICK START GUIDE - YOUR OWN WEBSITE IN 8 EASY LESSONS

Lesson 5. First Steps To A Perfect Website

There’s one final job to do before you can start to create a website that is all your own and that’s to do a bit of housekeeping and configuration. You need to do this basic setting up so that you clear out the sample content and configure WordPress to work the way you want it.

At this stage don’t worry if the details look unfamiliar and puzzling, just follow along and do it and it will all make sense eventually, I promise.

This won’t take long and then we can get on with the interesting stuff.

Delete The Junk (Sample Content)

For every new installation, WordPress provides some sample content which you don’t really need and which we’re going to delete.

When you look at your site you’ll see that WordPress has provided the following items on the site:

· Recent comments: Mr WordPress on Hello world!

· Recent posts: Hello world!

· Sample Page

We’re going to delete all that and start again. So, from the dashboard, Click on ‘Comments’. You’ll see the comment displayed as in Figure 5.1:

Now, hover your mouse over ‘Mr WordPress’ and a command line will magically appear underneath the comment. Click on ‘Trash’ and, hey presto, the comment’s gone.

Next, from the dashboard, click ‘Posts’. You’ll see the ‘Hello world’ box appear. Again, hover your mouse over it and click ‘Trash’. That’s gone, too.

Finally, from the dashboard, click ‘Pages’. You’ll see ‘Sample Page’ displayed. Hover and trash that, too.

Finally, we’ll get rid of a few plugins that we don’t need.

From the dashboard, click on ‘Plugins’ and you’ll see an item for Jetpack. Click ‘Deactivate’ and that will make it disappear.

And do the same with ‘Hello Dolly’. Delete this plugin and delete all the files. (Hello Dolly is a left-over from the WordPress blogging days and is of no use to us).

We’ll deal more with Plugins in Lesson 15 but, for now, that’s all you need to do.

Configure Wordpress To Behave How You Want

Finally, here’s where we check out a few settings to be sure that WordPress is going to behave as we want. Again, don’t worry if you don’t understand all of this - just do it…

From the dashboard, click on ‘Settings’, ‘Permalinks’. Under ‘Common Settings’ click the radio button ‘Post name’ if it is not already clicked. Then hit ‘Save Changes’.

Now you have to decide whether you want to allow your visitors to leave comments on your website. This has become a mixed blessing these days because the comments box has become a magnet for spammers and this can be a considerable nuisance. So, I advise you think carefully about whether you really do want to allow visitors to leave comments.

If you do allow visitors to add comments to your pages, by default, a comment box will automatically be displayed at the foot of each page. You have the option of moderating these comments but, if approved, the comments then become an integral part of your website.

To block comments, from the dashboard, go to ‘Settings’, ‘Discussion’ and uncheck ‘Allow people to post comments on new articles’. Then scroll down and click on ‘Save Changes’. That’s all you have to do on this page because now all the other settings will be ignored.

However, if you do want comments to appear on your site, check out Lesson 16 where I recommend how to deal with them.

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Now you’ve got a completely empty WordPress website ready and waiting for you to populate with your own stuff. And the good news is that, once you have completed Lessons 1 - 5, you don’t need to any of this work ever again.

So, with the preliminaries out of the way, let’s get moving!

FAQ

Say I want to display a comment box on some pages but not others - is this possible?

Yes - I answer this question in Lesson 16.