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This module is all about getting your website up and running. If you went through the Quick Launch course, you’re already pretty far along, but either way, this module will take you through:
- Site Settings
- Creating Pages
- Editing Templates
- Working With Menus
- Customizing Styles
In this lesson, we’re going to start with the basics to help you get around your main dashboard↗︎, and edit a few site settings to make your site a bit more interesting.
- Explore the dashboard to orient yourself with what it looks like
- Go to Settings > General↗︎
- Add a Site Title
- Add a Site Tagline
- Add a Site Icon
- Confirm or change the Language
- Confirm or change the Timezone
- Launch site (confirm your domain selection if prompted)
- Go back to Settings > General
- Change the Privacy setting if desired
We’re not going to deep dive into all the different options and settings available through your main dashboard↗︎ as many of them aren’t necessary for the initial setup of your site. However, we do encourage you to explore the settings yourself, as there are treasure troves of useful tools and features to be discovered!
It’s very important to get familiar with the layout of your dashboard, and what it looks like, since that’s how you’ll find your way around.
The main dashboard includes a link to My Site(s) and the Reader in the top left corner. Your Site Title at the top of the left sidebar is a Preview link you can click at any time to see a preview of your site — it won’t look like much yet!
If you have more than one site in your account, there will be a Switch site link at the top of the left sidebar to get to your other sites. You can also access all of your sites from Manage Sites↗︎.
Some options below the preview link may vary depending on your hosting plan, theme, and if you have any plugins installed, but you will always see: My Home, Stats and Upgrades at the top of the list when you’re in a WordPress.com site. These are the primary telltale signs you are in your main dashboard area within WordPress.com.
This main dashboard is where you’ll get to your Posts, Media (aka media library), and Pages. It’s where you can manage your site’s Comments and Feedback (which is the collection of any contact form submissions you receive).
The options available under Jetpack will depend on your hosting plan, so be sure to explore this area. For example, if you have the Creator plan or higher this is where you’ll access the backups of your site.
The options available under Appearance will depend on your active theme, but for Block themes, this is where you get to the Site Editor.
The Plugins section is only applicable for site’s on the Creator or Entrepreneur plan, but you can browse through and investigate various plugins, regardless of your hosting plan, to help with future upgrade decisions.
Users is where you’ll manage your team members and your subscribers.
Under Tools you’ll find links for Marketing, Monetize, and Advertising, all of which contain useful features for growing your site, as well as the Import and Export options.
Pro-tip:
When interacting with the left sidebar of your main dashboard, hovering over each item will reveal a sub-menu if there is one, clicking on each visible parent item will open the page of the first item in the sub-menu when there is one.
For now, let’s start with a closer look at the Settings section.
The General Settings support guide includes links for each of the additional options found under the Settings section, we’re going to focus on the General settings page.
The General Settings page is the first page under the parent section of Settings.
This section shows the main settings that we discuss in the section below.
The Site title displays in the title bar of a web browser, in the header for most themes, and may be used in other locations too. For this reason, it’s ideal to keep the Site title to 1 or 2 words and no more than 3 or 4 words.
The Site title can be anything you’d like to describe your site — whatever best reflects your site’s personality and topic. It doesn’t have to be the same as your site’s domain URL or your username, but you can also take inspiration from your URL if you like (for example: wpcoursespractice.wordpress.com could become WP Courses Practice). It could also be your name or your company name.
If you have a logo that displays your name, and you don’t want it to be repeated in the Site title, it’s better to hide the Site title from displaying on your site, than to leave the Site title blank. With Block themes, hiding the Site title from your live site is simply a matter of removing the Site title block from your templates. But if you leave the Site title field empty, there are other places, such as social sharing or search engines, that will display “Untitled” instead, and you don’t want that.
Go ahead and enter a Site title that resonates with you for the purpose of your site. You can change this any time you like.
The Site tagline is a brief description or catchy phrase to further describe what your site is about. This is where you can get a bit more descriptive to expand on your Site title. Some themes will display the tagline in the header or in the footer. There’s also a Site tagline block that will allow you to place it wherever you want.
Try to come up with a single sentence of just a few words that captures the essence of what your site is about. If you have an established brand, this is often the same as your slogan.
If you need to think about it, that’s fine, you can come back to this page when you’re ready, you can also change whatever you add here later.
Like the Site title, there are multiple benefits for including a Site tagline, especially for SEO, even if you choose to remove the Site tagline block from your templates.
The Site icon is used as a browser and app icon for your site. It’s the tiny image that you see next to the Site title on the browser tab.
This icon can sometimes double as your Site logo, but you can also assign different images each for the Site icon and the Site logo. Because the Site icon is most often displayed as a rather small image, it’s typically better to use a simple and clear graphic that’s easily identified.
The Site icon needs to be a square image that is 512 × 512 pixels. You can use any photo editing software to create this image. We find https://canva.com↗︎ to be a user friendly free option. The process of adding an image as your Site icon will also provide a cropping option to size a portion of the image you choose accordingly.
If you don’t have a ready-made image to practice with, you can click the image to the right, which will open the image in a new tab.
Right click on the image that opens and “Save Image as”. We recommend saving it to your desktop or to a dedicated folder for your website assets to keep them all together.
Then click on the Change button under the Site icon on the General Settings page and navigate to the file you just saved to upload the image as the Site icon. You can change this icon at any time as well.
The Language setting controls your site’s default language as seen by the public. It sets the language used for certain text elements of your site that you cannot edit directly, e.g., the comments form and some built-in buttons.
Each site has its own language setting, so if you have multiple sites associated with your account, each one can have a different language.
The language setting will not translate the text you have written on your site. See options for creating a multi-language site here.
If you select an RTL language (for example, Hebrew), the theme’s layout will mirror itself so that the text can be read properly from right to left.
You can also change your Interface Language, which is the language used for your WordPress.com dashboard (not visible to the public.) This is a separate setting from your site’s language.
You’re more than welcome to change the language as desired, but please note that this entire course, including screenshots, is in English.
Your Site timezone may be set to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) by default, which is in London, UK. If you live in a different area of the world, you’ll probably want to change this option. It may also default to the same timezone as your computer.
This setting matters when it comes time to publish, and, especially, schedule posts. If you choose to schedule posts in advance to publish at a certain time, the time it publishes will be based on the timezone you have set here.
As a brand new site, your site will not be automatically launched and anyone who comes across the site will see a Coming Soon page.
Often creators want to wait until they completely finish building their site to “Launch” it. But they do sometimes forget to come back to this step.
Launching the site will set it to be public so that anyone can view it. It also alerts search engines to the fact that there is a new site to be added to their index. Getting traffic to a site is one of the most important and challenging aspects of creating a website. However, search engines can take 4-6 weeks (or more) to index a newly launched site. For this reason, we recommend launching the site to be public, even before it’s fully ready, to give your site a chance to be discovered by search engines sooner.
It’s highly unlikely that visitors will accidentally find your site if you launch early, but even if one or two visitors do find it, it’s not usually a problem. It’s easier to add a message on the homepage saying the site is in development than it is to get your site into search engines. We cover ideas on how to handle this in our Plan Your Homepage lesson as well.
If you truly don’t want anyone to have access to your site at all, then after Launching you can choose to change the Privacy setting to Coming Soon or Private (these options will replace the Launch Site option). Just know that search engines will ignore your site until you set it to be Public, and that’s when the 4-6 week timeline will start.
When you click the Launch Site button, you may be taken through a second signup flow to see if you’re ready to add a custom domain and/or purchase a hosting plan (if you haven’t already). If you’re not ready to make these purchases yet, you can skip them. On the Domains page, look for the option to confirm your free site address selection (you might need to scroll to the bottom), and on the Plans page, choose the free site option.
When you return to the Settings > General↗︎ page, you’ll see the privacy options. If you choose either Coming Soon or Private at this point, be sure to return to this page when you’re ready to set your site to be Public, or no one will have access to it besides you.
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