One of the reasons that WordPress is so effective is it’s ease of use. Just spend a few hours learning it and everything will unfold to you quickly. But in this article, let’s to a fundamental WordPress theme tutorial and look at the major parts to get everything set up correctly.

WordPress Settings

The settings tab is at the bottom of the navigation on the left side. When you click on the settings tab, you’ll see quite a bit of options. Here are the ones that I always change.

• Writing: Change the lines shown to 20. It’s probably set on 10 right now, but I also think the new update chooses 20 by default. Just makes sure it’s 20 so you will have an easier time editing content.
• Reading: I use this tab mainly depending on if I want he front page to be a blog or a static page. Here you can change that, but make sure if you want to move the blog to a separate page, you create that page first.
• Permalinks: This is really important. The permalink is how your link will look in the address bar. By default, WordPress uses a bunch of numbers and strange characters. Select custom permalinks and always use this setup… /%post name%/

That is about it for settings. After I go there, I typically choose the theme that I will go with. Here are my two favorite themes and using them depends.

• Thesis Theme: I will go with thesis if I want a quick website. Thesis is really clean but it takes some coding knowledge. Besides I have come to like Authority Pro much more.
• Authority Pro: This theme is very versatile and it seems that the team that built it is standing behind it. You can do a lot with it from making simple site to making one that is a little more complex. It’s great for affiliate sites and list building.

After that, I will go through this process:

• Categories: If I organize the site through categories, I will typically set them up first. Depending on the site, I will make each one a certain keyword. But an easier way is to have a few categories, however you want to organize it, then use all your keywords for actual articles. I have been going to this route much more.
• Pages: My pages have been more for your customer things like a contact page, about page, and maybe some stable articles. Again this depends and it’s beyond the scope of this article.
• Plugins: I will then go through the plugins to make sure I have a few basics. Google XML Sitemaps is a necessary one. Contact 7 is one I like. Gravity forms is better but you have to pay for that one. TinyMCE, Akismat, and Duplicate Post is about all I really use. Too many can use up too much memory and it’s not advised.

That really gets things set up to the point where I can start putting in all of my content. This didn’t really go over the look of the site, but the process of changing that changes based on the theme you use.

Don’t worry about the rest of the options, most of them I really don’t tough at all. This is what I do and I hope it helps you get WordPress setup when you are first starting and I hope this WordPress theme tutorial helped you get started.

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