Wordpress Lesson 3: setting up your options (part 1)

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Continuing my series on Wordpress for Beginners, Lesson 3 is going to focus on setting up your options. There are a number of options that need to be set up before you really beginning blogging. I’ll deal with three that you need to change and explain what they are, why you should care about them, and how to set them. Other bloggers may have different tips for you, but I think these steps should help get you started!

So to modify your options in Wordpress, you need to do into Admin as before. Login and you will see the dashboard, now look along the row of commands until you see the words “Options”. Click and you’re there.

options

You’ll now see the commands listed below: General, Writing, Reading, Discussion, Privacy, Permalinks and Miscellaneous… You can click through the other commands later. But first, let’s get set up.

Setting Your Blog Title, Tagline, and Membership

Blog Title: When you were setting up your blog, perhaps you chose your title carefully, perhaps you didn’t. Either way, you may wish to change that. To do that, we’re going to open the ‘General’ tab on the top left. See it! Right under Dashboard in white. Clicking on this will take you to the following page.

generaloptions

Tagline: You can simply change the title of your blog in ‘Weblog title’ and hit return. So try that! Most people don’t know how to change the Tagline (the Tagline is the line of text that sits under your Weblog Title usually), but this is where you can change it.

Membership: I don’t recommend beginners screwing with the next two options Wordpress address or Blog address. So LEAVE them alone, unless you KNOW you have to change those.

Just below your E-mail address is a ‘Membership’ options. On this blog, I’ve allowed anyone to register to leave comments, and Users must be logged in to leave comments. You can of course change both of these. If you don’t want anyone else to register, then unclick ‘Anyone can register’. If you don’t want unregistered people to comment, then check the next one as I have. I’ll post later about commenting, if you’re still confused.

Don’t change the Default Role for new users. Subscriber is the lowest level role, and the safest.

Next in Lesson #4, we’re going to be looking at ‘updating service’… See you in a few days.

If you’re too busy, why don’t you sign up for my feed via RSS or Email, so you don’t have to keep checking the blog for the next part!

August 26th: InvestorBlogger is now 1 year old!

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InvestorBlogger is now celebrating one year as this blog, focusing on tech, blogging, and money. It’s quite a celebration as during that year, we passed a number of thresholds… and I’d just like to share them with you.

1. We broke through 100K Alexa for the first time (it’s now about 130K since then, because of a soft summer season). I’m not sure how reliable Alexa really is, because it’s been declining while my real traffic has been rising. Google has recorded an increase in traffic. So…

2. We broke through 100K Technorati Ranking (it’s 95K or so!).

3. We are just this month recording 1,250 Uniques according to Analytics, despite a period of five days where the code on the site was broken!

4. The non-salary money that I have saved since August 26th last year is now just over $5,000 (before any taxes) during that time. I’m sure that blogging helped to put away a considerable amount of that (approx. 50%), but the focus it brought on my finances also paid off.

5. The post count is approximately:

= 176,235 total all words from 1,028 posts
= 171 average words per post
217 (21.1089%) posts contain 300+ words

6. As seen in 105 Countries and Territories worldwide!

7. It’s odd that 54% of my visitors who use Windows actually prefer to visit my blog with Firefox! And only 5% use Vista!

The last few months have been less exciting, perhaps. But when you look back and evaluate the last year, it’s amazing to see how much the blog has grown since then. I’ll have to think of a suitable way to celebrate!

Buzz: Have you checked your credit report?

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Following up on this week’s theme of Financial Issues, we’ve looked at Mortgages, Credit Cards, Loans, as well as making a little extra money , it seems fitting that we review Obares.com, a website that aims to provide “…the best way to sell your home or buy your dream home the FSBO ( For Sale By Owner ) way.”

creditreport

In fact, the unique sales point of this website is quite simple: you will find the right tools including calculators (much simpler than opening Excel!), legal forms, mortgage information to help you buy and sell your home, and it includes (their words) a FREE FSBO Listing.

(updated information) When I went back today to visit the website today, I noted a new tab at the top for Forums and indeed there are: one for every state in the US. This is a very smart move on the part of Obares.com to include forums. VERY few Real Estate sites that I have reviewed in this blog have any kind of community feeling. In fact, it has been one of my leading criticisms of most of them. Creating a kind of community in your website allows you the opportunity to market your products to an obvious marketplace (don’t oversell!), increase traffic to your website overall, and build a relationship with clients that could last years.

It will take a while to bring traffic to the forums: I’d suggest the website owner create the states as child-boards, rather than simply mark 50-odd boards. It’s quite daunting for newbies to look through all of the boards. You could use a conventional approach: North, South, etc. Break the boards into about 8-10 major forums. Then add the states as children of the major forums. VB is quite capable of this. If you are interested in running good forums, TheAdminZone is well worth visiting both for information and as an example of how to run forums well.

forumsmortgage

Now, underpinning many of the financial issues that individuals and families face is the Credit Rating, which is an assessment of a person’s creditworthiness or ability to pay back any loan that is made. These days, Credit Reports are provided by agencies to lenders who then assess the applicant by referring to their FICO score.

For example, you have decided to buy a new house in Houston at $350,000. You walked into your local bank, picked up an application form for a mortgage, and filled it out. Once the application is complete, the bank will then refer to the credit bureaus for your score. It’s that score that can help you get the mortgage loan or have you turned down!

There is a lot you can do to reduce the risk of having lending applications rejected. The first is quite simple: know your own credit history and FICO score. You can apply to a company like Equifax to get your Equifax Credit Report, or Experian or Transunion so you can know what problems lie within your credit history. In fact, clicking through to the website will allow you to see some information on:

  • contacting the bureaus
  • how FICO scores are calculated
  • some tips on managing your credit cards
  • and guidelines on what FICO scores mean.

There are significant benefits for knowing your FICO score. You’ll be able to tidy it up, correct any errors, check for fraudulent activity and improve your score, by knowing what to look for. Once that is done, you’ll find that you should get better offers on your loans, credit cards and mortgages, thereby SAVING yourself money! What could be better than that?

(Ed. I’ve extended the content since version 1.0 and tightened some wording and a picture).