WordPress will need to be configured, if you want it to look different from every other WordPress website out there. Luckily there are lots of ways to customize WordPress, like themes, widgets, and more.

Two simple ways will be in customizing WordPress through the admin menus.

When you initially install WordPress, you will need to log into the admin section. This will take you to the Dashboard, which has a welcome banner like you see below.

welcome to wordpress

wordpress customize menuClicking on the “Customize Your Site” button will take you to a menu where you can go through the basic customizations for your site.

Different options will appear based upon which theme you have installed. Regardless of the theme you have installed, you will have the ability to edit the following sections.

Site Title & Tagline

The site title is what you “call” your website. This is not the URL. You will usually want something small and simple to work with.

The tagline goes underneath the title. It may be hidden, but is something that people will hopefully remember. For example, using a company, you have “Nike” as the Site Title/Company Name, and “Just Do It” as the tag line.

The tagline is memorable enough, that if you hear it, you know what the company is. If you are thinking that it’s a slogan, then you basically got the idea.

Navigation

Under navigation, you can choose what menus you want to display. Some themes allow you to have multiple menus. You can then create menus, and choose where to place them.

Note: you may only have one menu initially created, and will need to use the menu tool to create additional menus to assign. But don’t worry; you can access this page later on.

Static Front Page

By default, because WordPress is a blogging platform, WordPress will display the last few posts that you created on the home page. However, you can change this to display a given page. This is called a static front page, and you can select which page you want here.

By default, you are given a single page when you start. You may want to create another page to use as your static page, if you want a static page for your website.

Or Watch on YouTube

Initial Customization of WordPress was originally found on Access 2 Learn

Assistant Professor

Walter Wimberly is an Assistant Professor at a regional college in Tennessee, teaching Computer Science in the Software Engineering track. He works as a student advisor, oversees curriculum changes, develops new courses, and manages the advisory panel.
Walter taught full time for about 7 years, before going back into “industry” as a full stack Software Developer for a dozen years. There he focused on web based projects coding in JavaScript/jQuery and utilizing the Bootstrap CSS Framework on the front-end, and coding in PHP, ASP/ASP.Net, SQL on the back-end.

Since he loves teaching, he taught as an adjunct web and digital media classes for eight (8) years, while working in industry, and has since returned to teaching full time.

He has been married for over 25 years, and is father to several special needs boys. As such, he is working on some projects to help others who have special needs to be self-sufficient, and support the care givers of those with special needs. Check out his Autism blog for more info.

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