(This is part of the Atahualpa Tutorial for Beginners series)
For this post, I will talk about some preparation works before we proceed to do more customizations.
Maybe I should have done this in Part 1, but anyway it’s not too late to do so either. But if you’re not setting up a new blog, then this might not be relevant to you.
When it comes to designing your blog at the initial stage, it’s good to create some sample posts, pages, categories and tags to let you have a better view of the overall design.
i. Creating 3 Dummy Posts, Categories and Tags
You can use a random or dummy text generator to help you on “writing” few random posts.
There are many websites out there doing this, just do a Google search on “random text generator” will give you a list of options.
For this tutorial, I’m using http://www.lipsum.com/.
1. Go to http://www.lipsum.com.
2. Scroll down to the section where you can enter the number of paragraphs. Enter number 5, select the paragraphs radio button and click the Generate Lorem Ipsum button.
So here are the generated 5 paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum.
3. Log in to your WordPress Dashboard. Go to Posts > Add New.
4. Enter the title, copy the random text from www.lipsum.com and paste it into the content text box.
5. Add a sample category and post tag for this post.
6. Click the Publish button.
7. Repeat this process for 2nd and 3rd random text posts.
ii. Creating 2 Sample Pages
You will probably notice that there is a “Sample Page” that created by default during the installation. You can safely remove it.
1. Go to Pages > Add New.
2. Enter the page title “About” and click Publish. (You can write something on this page if you want)
3. Repeat step 1 and 2 for “Contact” page.
4. Once done, you should see their links on the page menu.
iii. Configuring Permalinks
By default, WordPress generates “ugly” or not so eye pleasing URL for each post.
The “A Complete Guide to Setup RSS” post would have atatutorial.com/?p=9 URL. The p stands for post, and 11 is the post ID.
Fortunately, you can change to something prettier easily in WordPress.
1. Go to Permalinks under Settings in the WordPress dashboard.
2. Choose the permalink structure you want. For this tutorial, choose Custom Structure and enter /%post_id%/%postname%/
So for my post titled “A Complete Guide to Setup RSS”, the URL would look something like this, http://atatutorial.com/9/a-complete-guide-to-setup-rss/
3. Click the Save Changes to save your configuration.
iv. Configuring the Site Title
1. Go to Settings > General in your WordPress Dashboard.
2. Enter your preferred site title. The suggestion is to include the keywords that you want to rank in Google here. The same site title will also appear in the title of viewer’s web browser. For my site, I will enter “Beginner’s Blogging Guide and Resources”.
3. Enter your preferred tagline. For my site, I will enter “Blogging Tutorial Blog”
4. Click the Save Changes to save the settings.
v. Blocking Search Engine Accessing You Blog
Configure to block the search engine (SE) from accessing your site, while your site is still under construction with random text posts. This is because you do not want the SE to index those random text posts and list them in the search results.
1. Go to Settings > Privacy in the WordPress Dashboard.
2. Select I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors.
3. Click the Save Changes button.
Remember to come back here to enable search engine access after you have completed the design work.
(This is part of the Atahualpa Tutorial for Beginners series)