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Personalizing Your WordPress Site

April 7, 2011 by Sue Surdam | Artizon Digital Leave a Comment

Personalize your WordPress site in less than 10 minutes. Customize the header, background, general settings, permalinks, user profile and explore widgets. A written version of instructions follows the video.

When we last left Craig, we had installed WordPress with Bluehost Simple Scripts and I had done some quick personalization:

I added his personal information to the tagline and a custom header. I want to show you this and more.

Let’s go to the dashboard and get started.

If you used Bluehost and Simple Scripts you may see this jet pack banner. This is a great new plugin and it is complex enough for its own video, so we will get to it later. I am going to disable the plugin for now.

To use a custom image for the header go to the Appearance tab in the left sidebar and choose Header.

I created this image in a photo editor. It is 940 x 198 pixels which is the exact size needed. If you choose to use an image with different dimensions WordPress will adjust the image to fit and the success of the results are variable. So crop your image to 940 x 198 for best results and save it in jpg or png format.

Upload your image from your computer.

Save your work

Let’s do the background next; it is listed right above the Header.

We are going to do a quick color change.

Click on select a color and drag to the desired color in this case black.

Save changes.

Next choose Widgets

Widget is a WordPress’s word for tools or content that you can add, arrange, and remove from the sidebars of your blog. Widgets make it easy to customize the content of your blog sidebar.

The Primary Widget Area control the content in the site’s sidebar. The site’s footer area is also populated by widgets.

Widgets are very customizable:

  • Change the order of the widgets by dragging and dropping them around in the sidebar.
  • Add a widget by dragging the widget from the Available Widgets.
  • Delete a widget or save it for later use by dragging to the Inactive Widgets.
  • Many widgets can be used more than once.
  • Widgets often have customizable options.
  • You can type text in the text widget just as you would in a document.
  • Plugins create custom widgets. The plugin for the social icons is the subscribe /connect/widget.

On to the Settings tab. To customize the tagline and title choose General.

This is where you make the edits to the basic information of your site:

  • Site Title: this appears in the upper left corner of your site page
  • Tagline: this appears in the upper right corner of your site, I have used Craig’s personal information here as will also appear in the webpage tab and in Google search results.
  • Confirm administrator email address for the site.
  • Change the time zone to LA.

A great thing about the Site Title and the Tagline is that it also appears on the tab on the top of the home page and in Google search results. If your clients are using Google search for their phone book, they will find you and your contact information instantly.

A quick stop at Privacy to confirm your site is visible on the web.

Last stop under Settings is Permalinks.

We want to get rid of the urls (web page addresses) with question marks and numbers. I chose month and name.

Save changes.

Finally, under Users choose Your Profile.

You should complete your total profile, but at the very least fill in the name fields.

You can change your nickname and choose how to publically display your name. This is what will your author name, I recommend choosing your full name. This is another bump in the Google search engines.

You can change your password here also.

Click Update Profile and you’re done!

Sue Surdam | Artizon Digital | WordPress Specialist and Social Media Solutions | 503-577-1035
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