blogmaking.net

WordPress sets up some defaults that you may or may not want to get rid off. The last post on links described how to remove the default links, here are some more…

Scrap the Hello World page
You’ll notice that WordPress sets up a default post for you which you can edit or delete.

Hello world!
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

The “Hello world” is a bit of a computer joke (it has become the standard for programming textbooks to start off with an exercise to print some “hello world” text or a variation on it). Go into Manage/Posts and either click on Edit and change it to some sort of Welcome To My Blog post (here’s mine) or just delete it by clicking on Delete.

I’ve kept mine because I’ve got a link to it in this post and sometimes I get sentimental about strange things…

Customise/Change your blog’s Tagline (or Title)
The Tagline I’m referring to is the little description under your main blog title heading. It’s pretty much a subtitle for your blog. So in my case, if you look under the big blogmaking.net title/heading at the top of the page, you’ll notice under it there should be “How to make a blog and other helpful (and related) stuff!” - that’s my tagline. Note that in some themes, this doesn’t show up.

Some one click installs ask you what you want the tagline to be when you’re setting it up, if that’s the case then just ignore this step. Otherwise, WordPress may have set up a default like “Just another WordPress weblog” which is what I had on mine before customising.

To change it, go into Options/General and edit your entries for “Tagline”. Note that if you don’t want a tagline, you can delete the entry so that it’s left blank. Remember to save your changes by clicking on “Update Options”!

While you’re there you may also want to change your blog’s title, you can do so by editing the entry for “Weblog title”.

Change your About page
The About page is a page NOT a post, this is because it’s designed to be kept in the same place (static) and has the same relevance today as next year, unlike a post which is more like a diary entry and changes its position as soon as you write another post. While they look similar, WordPress views and treats pages differently to posts.

Go to Manage/Pages and you should have a page called “About”, click on Edit (if you’re logged in and still using the default layout, you can also get there by clicking on the About link on your front page under Pages and then click on the “Edit this entry” link). You can edit the title and the content in the same way as a post (but you’ll notice that it has different options than posts, I’d leave them alone at this stage). I renamed mine to “About blogmaking.net”.