General WordPress Settings – Video 17

The general settings enable you to set the name of your site and the tagline.

These settings are crucial to the success of your blog because they determine how your site ranks in the search results.

Other general settings include:

• WordPress Address (URL) – Don’t change unless you know what you are doing
• Site Address (URL) – Don’t change unless you know what you are doing
• E-mail Address – New user notification
• Membership – Leave unchecked or you could suffer from large amounts of spam users
• New User Default Role – Set to subscriber

URL Settings

Its very important that you don’t change any of the URL settings or you may break your site

Membership

You may remember in the previous video about Users and the different capabilities each user role has.

One of the great things about WordPress is that you can create a membership site and also allow guests to post and/or publish new content on your blog.

Spam

One the other hand, there’s a large amount of automated spammers using software to find new blogs and insert links back to their website.

If you allow anybody to join your site as a member before you get to know them, you could suffer from large amounts of spam that can cause damage to your reputation with the search engines.

New User Roles

If you do decide to allow new members to join your site, its best to set the default new user role to subscriber.

Once you have a better understand of user roles and the capabilities of each role, you can then allow your members more responsibility.

Next Video

Lets now take a brief look at the settings for writing in WordPress.