General settings for your site

Transcript for “General settings for your site.”

Hi, this is Paul Kaiser for WordPressCity.com. Today we’re going to learn about the General Settings for your new WordPress website.

Accessing general settings

Let’s visit the General Settings for your WordPress website. If you go under ‘Settings,’ click ‘General.’

Title and tagline

‘Blog Title’ gives you a chance to name your website. ‘Tagline’ provides a short description for what your website is all about. In the default template, the ‘Title’ is put right in the top of the header, and the ‘Tagline’ is put right below the ‘Title.’ Different templates may make use of the title and tagline in different ways. Since this is ‘cusnews.com,’ I’m going to change the title to ‘Paul’s News Site.’ I’m going to have the tagline read ‘Demonstration news site.’

File location and web address

The ‘WordPress address’ shows exactly where your WordPress installation files are at on your server. The ‘Blog address’ shows the address people need to type in order to access your blog. By default, these are the same. In a later tutorial, we’re going to see how to remove the ‘/blog’ part so people can simply access your site with ‘cusnews.com.’ For now, we’ll leave them the same.

Administrator email

Your blog needs a main e-mail address where it can send various notifications about what’s going on, such as new user notifications and other things. I’ve simply used ‘paul@wordpresscity.com.’

Optional user registration

If you want to allow web visitors to fill out a form and become a registered user of your site, be sure to click on the ‘Anyone can register’ checkbox. Then, make sure you tell WordPress what you want the new user’s default role to be.

Brief summary of user roles

Let me give you the gist of ‘User Roles’ here, then I’ll provide an address where you can learn the ‘nitty-gritty’ later. I need to point out that you don’t have to be a registered user of a WordPress website in order to read the Posts.

(A complete description and chart regarding user roles is at the “Roles and Capabilities” page at wordpress.org.)

Subscriber

The first level of user is called ‘Subscriber.’ Basically, all they can do is read your Posts and comment on them.

Contributor

The next level up is a ‘Contributor.’ A ‘Contributor’ can actually write Posts for your website. They cannot add images to the Posts. They also cannot add uploads, such as PDF documents. Finally, they cannot ‘Publish’ the Post. That has to be approved by an ‘Editor’ or ‘Administrator’ level user.

Author

Beyond ‘Contributor’ comes the ‘Author’ role on your site. The ‘Author’ role can add Posts to your website, and they can also add images to their Posts, they can add documents like PDFs to their Posts, and they can actually ‘Publish’ their own Posts. Later, they can edit or delete their Posts, if they needed to.

Editor

Beyond the ‘Author’ role on a site comes a very powerful role called the ‘Editor.’ An ‘Editor’ has complete control over their Posts on the WordPress site. An ‘Editor’ can also control other users’ Posts. This means they can approve a ‘Contributor’ or ‘Author’ level’s Posts, and they can also edit them or delete them. Beyond that, and ‘Editor’ can add and control other types of content on your WordPress site, such as Categories, Pages, web Links, and other things that we’ll discuss later.

Administrator

Finally, above the ‘Editor’ comes the ‘Administrator.’ The ‘Administrator’ can do anything on the website. They can change Plugins, they can add and remove Themes, they can change the General Settings that we’re looking at right now. Basically, ‘Administrator’ is really the god of the whole WordPress site, if you’ll let me use that term.

Time and date

Timezone

Since all of the content on your WordPress website gets timestamped, you need to tell your site what ‘Timezone’ you are operating out of. In my case, Chicago is a major city in my timezone. Note that your web server might be physically located in a completely different timezone than where you operate from. Generally, I pick the timezone where my home is. After you’ve set this up, you are not going to want to change the timezone, or you will mess up the relative date between Posts. Even if you travel to a different timezone and Post from there, you should leave the timezone set the same.

Display formatting

The timestamps on your website can be shown in a number of different ways. Here, you can choose from 4 popular formats, or click ‘Custom’ and follow the rules found at this link to make the date format look exactly the way you want. The same holds true for ‘Time Format.’ Finally, here you can choose what day your week starts on. Where I live, Sunday is generally regarded as the first day of the week.

Saving changes

Now click ‘Save Changes’ so that any changes you have made in here will take effect. We can see now — if I refresh the user side of my site — the ‘Title’ and the ‘Tagline’ both refreshed. I hope this helps you understand the ‘General Settings’ of your WordPress site.