This is the fifth article in our Making an Author Site with WordPress series. If you already have WordPress settings done, you can skip to the next section linked at the end of this article.
After WordPress is installed, you may want to set the following settings. These are the typical settings that I set up for my author site. You can find these settings under the “Settings” menu in the left column in your WordPress admin panel.
General Settings
Site Title – This shows in the browser tab and as the “Logo” for your site if you don’t have one uploaded. It’s also used in SEO.
Tagline – This shows under your logo on certain themes, in the browser tab and also for SEO.
Membership – You may not want members on the site at first, so it’s best to uncheck this while setting up the site.
Time Zone, Date and Time Formats – It’s best to set these so that your posts and comments have the correct information.
Writing settings
We generally only set the default category in this section. This makes it easier when making posts. We can always choose another category for the post, but it does help to have the most used category as the default.
Reading Settings
For most sites, we set the Homepage as a static page, but for the author site it’s important to show recent articles on the front. We leave the setting at “your latest posts” and we also select to show a Summary of posts. We do that because many people visit from mobile devices and having a summary on the front makes it easier for them to view.
When setting up our site, we choose to discourage search engines from indexing and we ensure to go back and enable them once we have the site live.
Discussion Settings
For this, since we don’t want to deal with spam, we tend to disable comments or we require a user to be a member. To disable comments, we require a user to be a member and then we disable registration ( mentioned above under the General Settings section).
Privacy Policy
This is a very important step for you to take. First, you’ll want to create a Terms and Privacy Policy page or you can go to Settings > Privacy and click to Create Page. For my author site, I made one page that contained both the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
If you are allowing members to join and comment, you will probably want to choose the option to Create Page as the WordPress Privacy page contains a lot of pre-filled in information that will make it easier for you.
If you’re still not sure about WordPress settings, our clients can drop us a line in our BryZar support portal.
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