Having installed wordPress at your host account it’s time for initial settings of your website. We will have word about how to choose your wordPress theme first because it is the key to getting free traffic to your site through search engines, what we call organic traffic, which you can eventually use to monetize your website. The selection of a website theme is one skill that will determine your success or failure online. I advise you to go through my page on “What Is The Best WordPress Theme?”before you proceed.
You can select any of the types available be them custom or premium wordPress themes. My focus will be on free wordPress themes because I presume many of you will go for that and actually it’s wise to start with free themes to get a feeling of how themes work and how to customize them before going for premium or custom themes.
These are the questions to ask yourself in your search for your wordPress theme.
Does the theme fit my desired genre?
What are the features I need for my site?
Is the theme easily customizable?
If you have downloaded a theme and are not sure or not satisfied that the code is clean, you will have to scan your new theme of malicious code using one of the programs below which are all free.
1. Theme Authenticity Checker (ATC)
2. Exploit Scanner
3. Sucuri-Site Check Malware Scanner
Once you are decided on your theme, login to you wordPress website and go to your dashboard for initial settings.
Go to Settings> General
On this page write your “Site Title” which should be your main keyword. For example, for my new site topantiagingproducts.sagalawebs.com, I could write “Top Antiaging Products”.
Then change the tagline, where I could write “Get The Best Antiaging Products Here”
Go below to change your time zone and “save changes”, that’s all for the General Settings.
Still under Settings go to “Discussion” and to begin with check ” Allow people to post comments on new articles”. You can go through the other options and check as feel appropriate to you.
On “Permalinks”, check “Post Name” and check other options the way you like.
At the moment you have nothing to do on “Reading,Writing or Media”.
Don’t forget to “save changes” each time you are finished with a page.
Today’s Tasks:
1. Install the wordPress theme you have chosen on your site.
2. Do all settings described in this lesson.
In our next lesson we will learn how to set plugins and select a few plugins necessary to start with.
Cheers.
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